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9 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


BOOKS BY RUPERT HUGHES 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 

WITHIN THESE WALLS 

WHAT WILL PEOPLE SAY 

THE THIRTEENTH COMMANDMENT 

BEAUTY 

CLIPPED WINGS 

THE CUP OF FURY 

EMPTY POCKETS 

IN A LITTLE TOWN 

THE LAST ROSE OF SUMMER 

LONG EVER AGO 

MOMMA 

THE OLD NEST 

SOULS FOR SALE 

THE UNPARDONABLE SIN 

WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 

WHAT’S THE WORLD COMING TO 


HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK 
Established 1817 




THE 

GOLDEN LADDER 


BY 

RUPERT HUGHES 

\i 



HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 

NEW YORK AND LONDON 



THE GOLDEN LADDER 


Copyright, 1923, 1924 
Harper & Brothers 
Printed in the U. S. A. 

First Edition 

D-Y 

5^5^ 

B 




To 

v KARL EDWIN HARRIMAN 

WITH 

MY ANCIENT AFFECTION 


t 



THE GOLDEN LADDER 


X 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


CHAPTER I 

S HE took with her an old brown trunk that held but 
little gear. She took with her a young white chest 
packed with secrets and housing one heart, a hungry, cun¬ 
ning, unconquerable heart; a curious little engine that drove 
a lonely soul from the most inelegant depths to the most 
dapper heights. 

Betty lost her secrets one by one, but her heart—did she 
ever lose that? In any case, it kept her climbing, climbing; 
kept her color high and her head up and her courage warm 
when there were reasons enough, God knows, and often 
enough, for pallor, surrender, despair. Her little heart 
fought its way through a world that still crushed women 
down; and especially fought back at Betty—fought her, 
condemned her, and never whipped her. 

To be a warrior and keep beautiful, too! But Betty 
managed it. 

On this day, though, she felt neither beautiful nor brave. 
It is hard to be either an hour before a raw November day¬ 
break, on the shore of a cold salt river and on the tipsy deck 
of a boat that may not move in time to assure escape. 

Betty was running away from her yesterdays, and ask¬ 
ing nothing more of her to-morrows than that they should 
take her to other scenes; rid her of the griding cables hold¬ 
ing her to the rotten wharf of her youth, as the packet 
schooner she had boarded was held fast to the pier, though 
its two big sails beat about their masts and throbbed where 
the wind stroked them and whispered them seaward. 

Betty did not look her past at all; much less her future. 


i 


2 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


For her past was hideously sordid, and her future mali¬ 
ciously magnificent. 

Their victim was nothing marvelous either way. She was 
bonny enough, and young enough, just turned nineteen; 
and yet she was no Helen of Troy: her face would never 
have launched a thousand ships. 

Indeed, she could not even persuade that one little 
schooner to leave the dock a moment ahead of time. And 
she was afraid every moment that she would be dragged 
back ashore to degradations that she was sick of. 

She was sick of everybody and everything on the land 
she looked at. They called her “the prettiest girl in Provi¬ 
dence/’ but Providence in 1794 had only six or seven thou¬ 
sand inhabitants. And the cholera had but lately swept 
away any number of these—though not the ones that Betty 
might grimly have chosen. 

Of those that remained, the greater number were con¬ 
cerned with making rum from molasses, gin from juniper 
berries, spermaceti from whale oil, candles, rope, duck, 
snuff, slaves, and other smelly articles of merchandise. 
Tanneries and slaughter houses, salt tidal marshes and stag¬ 
nant ponds added fragrances of their own. The chief busi¬ 
ness of such citizens as were not engaged in the slave trade 
or the forging of anchors and cannon was “the mystery 
of the distiller.” The chief business of their women was 
“the mystery of the spinster or the housewife.” Neither 
Betty nor her mother had cared for either of the latter 
mysteries, though her father and her stepfather had devoted 
their lives to the encouragement of the first. 

Providence hated Betty, and she hated Providence. She 
longed to get away to New York, where there were already 
forty thousand people, and more coming in so fast that the 
town was actually overtaking Philadelphia. New York was 
young and wicked and eager; and Betty Bowen was also 
all three. 

Just now she felt old, afraid, forlorn. She loathed early 
rising, and this morning’s errand had tom her from sleep 
at half past four. Here she was aboard the boat at half 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


3 

past five, heavy eyed and shivering in her shabby garb. 
The sun would not come up out of Massachusetts across 
the Seaconck River for an hour yet. The sky was black and 
bleak and the college building and the church steeples on 
the hill were lost in its ink. The water was ink, too, but 
it slapped the schooner's flanks with a surly impatience. 

The wind was as impatient as Betty. Sometimes pas¬ 
sengers had to wait for hours, for days, before the tide 
and the wind were right. Both might fail at any moment. 
At any moment she might be recalled to the duties she was 
deserting. 

She would not leave the chill deck and go into the cabin. 
She wanted to watch the last passenger from Boston come 
across the plank, for then the schooner would sail and her 
future would begin. 

The stage from Boston had rolled down on time at sunset 
the night before and emitted the usual number of travelers, 
who paused to kick the kinks out of their legs, rub their 
tortured backs and sides and their both, and hurry into 
the Golden Ball Inn for a late tea at six. 

Betty always watched the Boston stages come in. There 
was something glorious about horses and carriages that in¬ 
toxicated her. 

Perhaps there was no other thing that urged her out 
of Providence so much as a mad longing to own a carriage. 

She could have gone to New York by stage, but she did 
not like to be cooped up for days with other people who 
had as much right to the horses as she. 

She could never own a carriage in Providence. She was 
known too well there—or too ill there—for a carriage mar¬ 
riage, even if the town had possessed more than the one 
or two shabby private vehicles it boasted. 

She longed to own horses—a lot of them galloping in a 
line. She yearned to own a four-horse stage-coach and ride 
in it all by herself. She wanted to drive behind eight horses 
at once! (And one day she would.) 

But thus far she had never even been inside a stage- 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


4 

coach. She had made eyes and smiles at the drivers, but 
they had never thought to offer her a ride. 

She had heard that one's neck and spine were almost 
snapped apart and that the passengers were literally spanked 
from Boston to Providence, but life was rough going at 
best, and if horses galloped, the worst of it was the sooner 
over. 

Anyway, it was glorious to hear the coach horn clamor 
down the hills, along the rolling road from Pawtucket, into 
Benefit Street; to hear the wheels thunder; to hear the 
sixteen-hoofed music of the zesty steeds and hear the whip 
slash and crackle about their pointed ears. 

The springless New England stage was only a long cov¬ 
ered wagon with a mass of luggage at its rear, and four ill- 
kempt horses loping along in front, a jumble of seventeen 
passengers and a loquacious driver between, not to mention 
a floor cluttered with mail bags, and merchandise for de¬ 
livery at the roadside towns. But to Betty it was royal 
equipage. 

She had stood outside the Golden Ball Inn the evening 
before and gazed so wistfully at the wheeled torture- 
chamber that one burly passenger had tweaked her chin 
and asked her if she wanted him to buy the stage for her. 

“Yes, sir! If you please, sir!” she answered. And he 
laughed mightily. But he did not buy her the stage. 

She heard the black slave who greeted him call him 
“Mossa Cap’n Dellycraw.” She hoped he was a sea cap¬ 
tain, for she loved the sea and its folk. She wondered if 
Captain Dellycraw would come aboard the packet. She 
wished he had invited her in to tea. She had never eaten at 
the inn. She had eaten at the workhouse, though—damn the 
place and the people! And one day she would come back 
and occupy the best room in the inn and fling from her 
balcony window boasts of her triumphs. 

But that was for the far-away. There was nothing to 
boast of in her past, except its extraordinary lack of things 
to boast of. 

Four years ago she had made one of the crowd outside 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


5 

the Golden Ball Inn when President Washington visited the 
town after Rhode Island had finally decided to quit hag¬ 
gling, belatedly accept the Constitution, and join the United 
States. 

The thirteen-gun salute that greeted General Washington 
had drawn fifteen-year-old Betty to the streets, where she 
saw Governor Fenner leading a wonderful parade with all 
the bells ringing, drums rolling, fifes screaming, and three 
negro “scrapers” scraping. 

All the next day there were parades and a grand banquet 
at three, where, it was said, thirteen toasts were pledged 
in stout Providence rum. 

The most startling things she noted about the great man 
were that his face was heavily pitted with smallpox marks 
and that his false teeth seemed to distress him. 

But Betty revered him. And since it was the fashion to 
name everything after him from porcelains to children and 
cities, she named after him the first thing she could call her 
very own—but that was one of the things she had vowed 
to forget. 

Betty knew nearly all there was to know of life except 
its pleasanter phases. At nineteen she knew all about 
poverty and sin, prison and shame, banishment and ob¬ 
scurity; she knew nothing of wealth and good works and 
pride and glory. She had lived in a small town’s slums, the 
region known as “Hell Huddle” or “The Devil’s Hopyard” 
or “Hard Scrabble.” Henceforth she was done with hud¬ 
dling and scrabbling. She was out after jewelry, silks, an 
honest man’s name, invitations—and above all things car¬ 
riages and horses. 

And she would win them! 

Carriages? She would own Napoleon’s carriage of state 
and ride in it! It is easy to record this as history; it would 
have been a startling prophecy; for at that moment Napoleon 
himself had small prospect of a carriage; he was merely 
the least of the shiftless Corsican Buonapartes, too poor to 
pay for a fiacre, too poor to pay his laundress for his other 
shirt. He was under arrest as a soldier, idle and in disgrace 


6 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


with the French army and wishing that his father had acted 
on his first plan and put the lad in the British navy, where 
he would have stood some chance for a future ! 

Jewelry? Betty would own the very imperial sapphire 
crown that Napoleon set on the head of the Empress Jose¬ 
phine after he took it from the hands of the Pope, who 
came to Paris for the ceremony. At this moment, however, 
Madame Josephine Beauharnais was uncertain how long 
she would be allowed to keep her life. Like Betty, she had 
been in jail—for a whole year, indeed, expecting every 
moment that her pretty head would be sliced off by the 
guillotine, to drop in the great waste basket of the Revo¬ 
lution, where her late husband’s head had thumped. The 
shabby Napoleon had not even met her, nor passed through 
the first phase of her scorn. 

Betty’s destiny was to be strangely bound up with the 
French and France, and she had been unconsciously pre¬ 
pared for it by a bit of charity. 


CHAPTER II 



HE wonder was not that Betty read and wrote indif- 


1 . ferent well, but that she read or wrote at all. For 
the only schoolhouse in Providence had burned down the 
year before she was born; and was not rebuilt for fifty years. 

Yet, in this paradise for children she acquired somehow 
a smattering of the three R’s, and no doubt a little French. 

She gleaned her bit of French, it may be, when she was 
just coming eighteen; for in that year Providence was sud¬ 
denly encumbered with a horde of French refugees driven 
from San Domingo when the bitterly abused slaves broke 
free in 1793 under “the black Napoleon,” Toussaint l’Ouver- 
ture, and whipped the best troops that France or England 
sent. 

Many of the French fled for their lives to Rhode Island 
because the French army and fleet that fought in our Revolu¬ 
tionary War had spent so much time so pleasantly there 
that they tried to compel the new United States to make 
France a gift of the little state. But republics are un¬ 
grateful ; otherwise Betty might have been reared a French 
subject. 

The fugitives from San Domingo were poor and helpless, 
and Providence and Newport grandly poured out thousands 
of pounds in feeding them and finding them employment. 

Betty had a palm that could be generous, and it is as 
likely as not that one day, while walking her post along the 
Towne Street and the Market Parade and wet Weybosset 
and across the bridge, she saw a lean and yearning young 
man who looked hungry, and that she took his hand right 
familiarly and closed it upon a warm coin that she had earned 
in one way or another—probably the latter. His name was 
probably Pierre. 


7 


8 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


If so, he must have noted how pretty she was, how soft 
her hand, how full of welcome her eyes. What could he 
do but kiss that velvet hand and murmur: 

“Mille remerdements, mademoiselle! Que le bon Dieu 
vous benisse!” 

To which Betty would answer, of course: 

“What?” 

He must explain: 

“I say I sank you sousand time.” 

“Oh! Don’t mention it!” 

“Men-shun ? What is it it is—men-shun ? A house, yes ? 
no?” 

“Oh, Lord, no! Mention is to—it means to—well—don’t 
say anything about it!” 

“Oh, I am sorwee! You have not got hankry wiff me ?” 

“No, no! of course not. Why should I get mad? You 
see—when you said, ‘Thank you,’ I said ‘Don’t mention 
it.’ I mean you don’t have to thank me just because I 
gave you a shilling.” 

“Ho, I see. You say like II n *y a pas de quoi” 

“Eel ya pa de what ?” 

The French can laugh at almost anything except mis¬ 
pronunciation. Few other things amuse Americans so much. 
So Betty laughed herself sick over her own bad French 
and Pierre’s bad English, while he suffered torments for 
both. 

But it was exciting; and they dawdled along the street 
and almost walked into the high tidewater as they played 
battledore and shuttlecock with their limited vocabularies 
and studied their languages in the living lexicon. 

Pierre’s courtesies thrilled Betty. She was not used to 
being treated with such distinction and she overestimated 
the importance of his compliments. 

And he, thinking from her beauty that she was of better 
quality than she was, never dreamed of her appalling origins; 
he regarded her charity with meekness. 

Perhaps for the first time the girl breathed the heady 
air of formal gallantry. It was her introduction to the grand 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


9 

manner, and if Pierre’s ignorance made him substitute 
gesture and bow for the exact phrase, she took it all as 
chivalry. It gave her a most voluptuous glow. 

And he, not knowing her language well enough to know 
how little of it she knew herself, found in her soft voice 
and her rich lips the authority of the Academy. 

So odd it was to her to be looked up to, that she would 
not break the spell. She bade him good-by and turned 
into a shop to be rid of him, lest he follow her to old Mother 
Ballou’s next door to the tallow chandlery, and learn some¬ 
thing of her true estate. 

The next day she met him again upon Weybosset Street, 
paved with tide-soaked pebbles and shells, and when he fell 
in at her side she led him, as if by chance, away from the 
noisome rum distilleries, past where the green hides brought 
in from the Spanish Main were turned to leather. She 
was afraid that some of her old familiars might bespeak her 
there and betray her character to this first soul that had 
found in her something to revere. 

So she climbed with him to Fox’s Hill, where they could 
overlook the harbor heavily timbered with masts. A hundred 
and fifty sail were owned in Providence and boats of nine 
hundred ton were building there for the India trade and 
the China trade and the unpitied human freight they stole 
from Africa. 

But all the sail were idle in the harbor now, for the 
embargo was on and both French and British privateers 
captured the ships of the helpless republic wherever they 
found them. 

Few hulls went out from Providence nowadays with 
cargoes of cordage, cannon, shot, masts, spars, and anchors, 
candles, tar, ginseng and gin, and New England rum. Her 
fleet no longer called at Madeira, Madras, Pondicherry, and 
Canton; at St. Helena, St. Ascension, and St. Eustatia; 
nor came home with tea and silks, lacquers and china; with 
printed calicos, bandano and pulicat silk handkerchiefs, 
Persians, taffetas, saltpeter and window glass and cotton 


10 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

goods from Manchester, to be sold at vendue in the market 
place. 

It irked Betty to see the lolling, naked masts at rest. She 
told Pierre she would love to sail on some tall East India- 
man to worlds remote from sordid Providence, but Pierre 
begged her to dream of France, especially of Dieppe on 
her white cliffs. He was an ardent Dieppois and he some¬ 
how made her understand and believe his belief that a cap¬ 
tain from Dieppe had discovered America long, long before 
Christophe Colombe arrived in his borrowed ships from 
Spain. 

Pierre told her haltingly how he had been forced to give 
up his dreams of being a poet and a novelist and had been 
shipped to Saint Domingue to learn the coffee trade, only 
to be saved from failure by disaster. 

He had no books now except in his head, but he had 
a pretty memory for snatches of old poetry. Her sweet 
blond pate reminded him of Pontus de Thiard’s line “L’as¬ 
pect benin de mon etoile blonde 

His poverty as well as her beauty reminded him of an¬ 
cient verses, and he recited to her the little poem of Saint 
Gelais, beginning: 

“Un charlatan disait en plein marche 
Qu’il monstreroit le diable a tout le monde.” 

She liked the jigging lilt of it but he had to put it in 
English for her, somewhat like this: 

“A—how you say —Un charlatan?” 

“We have ’em here,” said Betty, “Je campron” 

“Yes? How nize! Alors! A charlatan is saying in mar¬ 
ket place, to much people, how he will show zem all ze— 
ze —le diable —” 

“The devil! Go on.” 

“So it was not nobody who did not runned to see zat 
naughty mans, the diavle —vous saves?” 

“I know him.” 

“So Monsieur le Charlatan he takes out a beeg bourse — 
how you call him—a for to keep moneys into it?” 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


ii 


“A purse!” 

“ Oui, yes, yes—a pourse. He takes out one beeg pourse, 
a grand, profound pourse, and he say, ‘Gentlamens, open 
yore eyes, and see, is it anysing inside ?’ ‘No!’ say mans 
who stands close by. ‘No!’ he say, and Charlatan say, ‘To 
open yore pourse and see nossing inside—zat is ze diavle.’ ” 

“That is the devil, for sure,” sighed Betty. “The inside 
of an empty purse is—hell.” 

She sighed from the profundity of old woes, and Pierre 
sighed because poverty was new to him, but complete. 

It surprised him to learn that his benefactress should be 
so well acquainted with penury, and it emboldened him, too. 

Seeing the sun just skimming the Western edge of the 
world like a vast red discus, he said: 

“For w’y are we so sat, we two? You are so yong and 
so belle, and me, I am not old. Do you know w’at Gilles 
Durant sing to his Charlotte? No? He tell her how the 
light of ze sun goes out at night but comes again at—at— 
a V aube premiere —” 

“At daybreak?” 

“Si, si! But he say w’en our light goes out he stays 
in ze tomb and navver, navver retourns. So he sings: 

“Aimons done d notre aise: 

Baisons-nous bien et beau, 

Puisque plus on ne baise 
Ld-bas sous le tombeau. 

“Let us love us w’ile we can. Let us kiss us much and 
pretty. Bee-cose nobody kisses nobody down zere onder zose 
gravestone.” 

And this seemed suddenly the most important fact in 
the world, the most implacable truth, the pitifulest, crudest 
of all decrees—Kiss well and tenderly without delay, for 
down there beneath the tombstone nobody kisses anybody. 

The sun was a great bleeding heart aching away into the 
night, and the gloaming gathered its soft shroud about their 
young shoulders. 

They looked into each other’s eyes and saw deep shadows 


12 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 

of oncoming doom. Their lips parted in suffering, their 
breasts panted in haste to seize what little grace the brevity 
of their youth begrudged them. 

They leaned together till their mouths met and kissed. 
This first salute of their prompt love was more like a fare¬ 
well than a greeting. But it was so sweet that each caught 
the other in fierce arms; and there on the headland over the 
harbor they clung together as if they were drowning in black 
waters. 

She was a girl and he was French, and they wept bounti¬ 
fully, quelling their sobs with kisses and caresses. 

He loved her so dearly that he groaned: 

" ‘O nuict, jalouse nuict contre moy conjured' ” 

After a long while he whispered, with loving self-sacrifice! 

“It is dark soon and cold, and I must take you home, ma 
mid" 

The word “home” made her shudder, but he thought that 
it was the chill of the twilight wind and he urged her away. 

She would not have left the enchanted place but for the 
fact that he began to cough and to shiver in his scant gar¬ 
ments. She knew that he was not strong and she made 
haste to descend with him into the darkening streets. 

But she would not let him go far with her. He laughed: 

“Your mother does not like you come home wit’ a strange 
yong mans, no?” 

“My mother! O God!” 

And she laughed bitterly, a harsh, acrid laughter that 
frightened him and silenced him. 

But they agreed to meet again on the morrow and she 
went her ways alone, while he stared after her, tenderly 
bewildered. 


CHAPTER III 


F INDING their lofty trysting place pre-empted the next 
day, they sauntered along the edge of the brackish salt 
marshes where the tides came and went. 

He had learned some English in San Domingo and he 
told her of the novel he had planned. He was going to 
write it down as soon as he found a comfortable lodging 
with a table and ink and a goose quill. He had written 
to his people in Dieppe telling them where he was and 
begging them to dispatch him funds. The letter should 
reach them in forty or fifty days and his blessed mother 
would see to it that his father sent him enough and in 
haste. In a hundred days he hoped to be a gentleman 
again, or at least an author. 

Never having met an author, Betty was bewitched with 
pride at the encounter. And indeed authorship is a de¬ 
licious trade, or would be if it were not for the various 
infernos of getting one’s cloudy fantasies crushed down 
into hard and cold syllables, and thereafter into type and 
the market place. 

This author was at that pleasant period of literary travail 
when the brain child is only a conception. He was as 
proud and hopeful of it as any mother of her first-born, 
before it is visible, tangible, audible—and olfactible—as 
an actual infant. 

He told his plot with relish and Betty listened with the 
same intense delight that she had felt when she heard her 
first fairy stories as her mother told them to her on the 
rare occasions when her mother had the time, the humor, and 
the sobriety. 

For his heroine Pierre announced that he had chosen a 
beautiful blond of the royal family of Capet, the ancient 

13 


14 the golden ladder 

dynasty that had ruled in France until Louis XVI lost 
his head a year or so ago. 

The heroine’s mother was to be so grand that, when 
she went to the West Indies to join her husband, the king 
must assign a warship to carry her thither. But, alas! 
before the boat arrived the mother had to die in giving 
birth to the heroine. (It is astonishing how fatal it is to 
give birth to a heroine. Countless mothers in fiction have 
perished of that complaint.) 

The little Capet infant would of course survive all perils of 
the sea, as heroines do, and the captain himself would 
care for her, only to learn when the ship reached its port 
that the plague had carried off the baby’s father. 

What could the poor captain do then? Why, keep her 
on board, of course. A girl baby on a warship, however, 
would be so inappropriate that when the frigate should 
put in at Newport the captain was going to leave her with 
a friend he had ashore. Then he would sail away about 
his business and never come back. So the daughter of 
the Capetian kings would be reared by a poor man in 
America! Naturally she would grow up to be incredibly 
beautiful, as heroines do. 

Her author found himself describing her in terms of 
Betty. It would have outraged Pierre’s sense of courtesy 
to paint her otherwise. Miss Capet looked like Betty, talked 
like her, walked like her, and- 

And this was as far as Pierre had got with his plot. 
Being ohe of the extreme republicans of France, he planned 
to have her realize how much nobler plain democracy is 
than any royal pomp. He expected to give her for her 
lover a glorious American laboring man who dwelt in a 
humble cottage and earned his modest living by the might 
of his brawn. And then the heroine would find how much 
happier a woman always is in plain and simple surroundings 
than she could ever be in any splendor of jewels, satins, 
feasts, and carriages. 

“Nonsense!” cried Betty. “Silly lies and nonsense! No 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


15 

woman can be really happy except when she is better dressed 
and housed than all the other cats.” 

Betty simply would not have Pierre’s conclusion. She 
demanded that the princess should regain her rights and 
marry a young and beautiful banished prince or something. 
The two would thereupon return to France, whip the Revo¬ 
lutionists back to their kennels, and put her husband on 
the throne. When he was busy kinging, sweet Miss Capet 
was to ride round Paris in a chariot drawn by eight snow- 
white horses of Norman blood. She would smile as the 
people cheered her and stripped roses of their petals to 
soften the road for her wheels, while all the other women 
went green with envy. Pierre found Betty’s conclusion 
banal, merely a Cinderella ending to a fairy story. But 
Betty knew that Cinderella was true to life, the commonest 
thing in history. Peasants who became princesses were as 
frequent as swineherds who became kings, and Betty was 
going to be a Cinderella herself. 

Her plot ideals seemed to Pierre inartistic and popular, 
but she overbore his scruples and he consented to write 
the story as she wished it. 

He never did. For one of the town’s most amiable busy- 
bodies found him employment so that he might earn an honest 
living in one of the famous Providence steel mills where 
stout anchors were made and the best bayonets to be had on 
this side of the ocean; and gunstocks, ramrods, and flint¬ 
locks innumerable. 

Those mills were patriots and proud of their history; for 
when the battle of Lexington had roused the nation to 
arms, and it had found almost no arms to rise to, the town 
of Providence set to work with might and main and poured 
forth muskets by the hundred; and cannon—cannon to 
stand still for the Rhode Island defenses and wheeled can¬ 
non for the troops of Washington to lug about with them 
in their everlasting retreats. 

Was not General Nathanael Greene a steel-mill man, and 
a Rhode-Islander born? Had he not been expelled from 
the Quaker church for his military ardor? Had he not 


i6 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


marched from Providence as a private and become a general 
within a month and the best retreater in the army, next 
to Washington? 

Even when the war was over the iron mills had not 
drawn their fires. The ox-teams still moved in herds, carry¬ 
ing ores to the furnaces. And the millers perfected their 
processes till their steels, both blistered and drawn, rivaled 
the best imported so well that importation ceased. 

And now the shipyards were working again for some 
future war. The immortal frigates, the Constitution and the 
Constellation , the President and the others, were building, 
and there was a cry for cannon to arm them withal so that 
the republic might answer the European tyrants with the 
only arguments they understood—hot shot. The Rhode 
Island mills were casting cannon solid and boring them 
with water; making them with such care that when any 
casting was imperfect it was thrown back into civil life 
and must stand as a hitching post on a street corner. 

It was in these mills, roaring throughout the day and 
flaring throughout the night, that Pierre was offered work. 
He could not refuse it, though he was not built to puddle 
in molten irons. 

And Betty toiled in her way, keeping her business secret 
and hoping that Pierre might never learn how she was earn¬ 
ing her marriage dot; for she hoped to sail away to France 
with him and dwell where no one would know too much 
about herself and her family. 

They could meet no more by daylight now; and after 
the fourteen hours required of laborers, his weak frame was 
so exhausted that he could no longer hoist himself to Fox’s 
Point or even saunter the streets with the woebegone Betty. 

And so she had to take him to Mother Ballou’s for their 
evenings together. She had to let him learn the bleak and 
awful truth about her, and her “mother” Ballou. He was 
thunderstruck; yet he did not call Betty names or accuse 
her of deceit. He was Christlike in his forgiveness, but not 
in his aloofness. He put away his deference, his protective¬ 
ness; his tenderness changed to a fiercer mood. He, the 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


17 

light, the malleable poet and romance-babbler, became a 
hard man. 

The bitterness of his sudden knowledge of life tempered 
him in an instant as the shock of cold water turns hot 
soft iron to steel. He grew strong and coarse, commanding, 
demanding. He did not care how Betty earned her money. 
He drank much of Mother Ballou’s stoutest rum and banged 
the table with the mug and hugged Betty till her ribs creaked. 
Betty liked him so. But she had loved him as he was. He 
began to teach her French so that she might go home with 
him some day. She learned the lilt of it, the “t” on the 
lips, the “r” in the throat like a rolled “w,” the nasals on 
and an and in, and how to say est-ce-que and auriez-vous 
la bonte de, and— 

And then she lost him. 

One evening as she stood watching the flames leap from 
the chimneys of his forge like flaunted scarlet and yellow 
banners, there rose a volcano of splashing fire, an earth¬ 
jarring thud, then a scurry of blazes all about the shat¬ 
tered mill. 

A furnace had exploded. Among the charred and mangled 
bodies they found the dead Pierre. 


CHAPTER IV 


N OTHING was left for Betty now, it seemed, but to 
abandon her hopes of romance and follow her mother’s 
footsteps. Such footsteps! 

It is not usual or respectable to write the truth about 
motherhood; therefore the women who triumph in this 
most difficult of careers are robbed of their rightful praise 
by an idiotic habit of pretending that all mothers are divine 
and all homes temples of virtue, and that the world would 
easily be saved if children would only obey their mothers 
and stay at home. It makes no difference that history is 
packed with proof that really good mothers are as rare as 
really profitable homes; and that the beginning of most 
successful (and unsuccessful) lives has been the departure 
from home. 

How can the world be saved by lies ? And who tell more 
of them than the folk who call themselves good and prove 
their virtue by condemning the disclosers of fact, and by 
telling ugly lies, and suppressing truths in the name of the 
True, the Beautiful, and the Good? Until the virtuous 
are reformed the vicious seem pretty safe from being saved. 

Rivaling the monstrous eternal lie about Home and Mother 
in general is the perennial lie about the exemplary virtues of 
forefathers and foremothers. It began with the second 
generation of the children of man. It has never been true 
and will always seem so. 

Because Betty is so gleaming an example of so many 
forbidden facts, she becomes important as well as disturbing. 

This account of her is hardly worthy of the high name 
of Fiction. It is hardly better than mere History. It 
almost stoops to common Biography; for the astonishing 
things in it are recorded fact. The rest is mere background 

18 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


l 9 

and sackcloth to fill up the chinks where the documents 
are missing. 

Betty’s mother was one of the billions who become 
mothers because they cannot help themselves. She bore 
children for the same reason that weeds bear flowers, and 
weasels multiply, and jungles are populous with little savages. 
She was the helpless victim of the self she drew in the 
one lottery that human laws have never touched. 

If there is such a thing as Nature and if we do not 
flatter her with what we call her “purposes,” then Nature 
in her mysterious purposes made an early call on Phebe 
Kelley. As soon as Nature could get her ready, Phebe 
began her life work. At the age of twelve she was already 
so notorious that the little town of Providence officially 
invited her to take her perilous activity back to Taunton, 
Massachusetts, where she had been born to the late John 
Kelley—of whom we know nothing except that he was 
already “late.” Phebe had a sister named Mrs. Timothy 
Rind, who was also invited to get out of Providence with 
her. 

If Phebe obeyed the Town Council, she must have re¬ 
turned at once, for at the age of thirteen she was already 
the mother of a boy. She called him John Thomas Bowen. 

It may have been significant that, a year later, she mar¬ 
ried a “foreigner and a seafaring man” named John Bowen. 
When Phebe was sixteen she had a daughter whom she 
called Polly Bowen; and at nineteen another whom she 
called Betty Bowen, the immortal Betty. 

It may have been also significant that sailor John was 
rarely at home. At least his name does not occur with 
Phebe’s in her frequent appearances before the Town 
Council as an incorrigible nuisance. So he probably left 
her, as sailors do, to bring up her children (and his?) as 
worst she could. 

In those good old Puritanic days sin appears not to have 
mattered so much, so long as the sinners or their children 
did not come upon the town for support. Money was 


20 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 

money and taxes have always hurt worse than almost any 
other public sacrifice. 

Phebe was a wrong-one consistently from start to finish, 
with not a single handsome thing mentioned of her in her 
whole life. And so, since perfect scores are impossible 
in this world, one is tempted to wonder if malice or oblivion 
were not her biographer instead of the perfect all-merciful 
truth. 

Who can ponder long upon the stories that are told us of 
souls like Lucifer, Cain, Jezebel, Judas, Messalina, and 
their sort without coming to think that they are victims 
of some conspiracy of history as well as of fate, and that 
whatever wrongs they may have done, wrong has been done 
to them? We know now that Lucrezia Borgia, chiefly 
remembered as a woman who poisoned nearly everybody 
she disliked, probably never actually poisoned anybody. We 
know that Elizabeth, the wanton queen, was the helpless 
prey of slander and was probably the permanent virgin 
she boasted of being. 

So Phebe Kelley must have been outrageously wronged 
by life, or the police reports, or somebody, or something; 
for she was quite too ideal a wretch to be possible. 

Somewhere along the road she must have scattered a 
few flowers. There must have been moments of winsome¬ 
ness, of pathos, of regret, of generosity. Perhaps all her 
crime was her too lavish generosity of herself. Else, how 
could she have borne a child of such high spirit as Betty? 

The climax of Betty’s career was concerned with an¬ 
other horribly overrated villain, Aaron Burr. He came 
late into her life and it is odd that he was born just a 
year before her mother was born. Odd, too, that a man 
of the most lofty heritage and environment, and a woman 
of the worst possible both, should meet and mate; and that 
the woman should prove the better man of the two. 

Aaron Burr’s grandfather on the distaff side was no 
John Kelley. He was that noblest of early American 
preachers, Jonathan Edwards. Aaron Burr’s father was 
a clergyman, too, and an early president of the college 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


21 


at Princeton. Here the young Aaron was a prodigy 
of learning and assiduity. He, too, was raised to 
be a clergyman and devoted an earnest year to theological 
studies in the home of a clergyman. He was a splendid 
soldier and an ardent statesman, and the result of it all 
was that he is America’s most precious knave, next to 
Benedict Arnold. 

Aaron Burr was already a miraculously gifted student 
of the law when the woman who was to be his final affair 
was just getting herself born to squalor and shame. 

Betty arrived in America in 1775 along with the Goddess 
of Freedom, and with as little prospect of success. During 
her first inarticulate protests against the tyranny of exis¬ 
tence the Americans were kicking against the British dia¬ 
pers; the Boston tea party was having its echo in Provi¬ 
dence; the town-crier was bawling down the streets his 
memorandum to “the Haters of Shackles and Hand-cuffs 
to testify their good Disposition by bringing into the mar¬ 
ket place and casting into the Fire, a needless Herb which 
for a long Time, hath been detrimental to our Liberty, 
Interest, and Health.” While Betty was complaining of her 
young mother’s milk, Providence was destroying three hun¬ 
dred pounds of the mother country’s tea, for spite. 

Betty was a disgusting infant when Col. George Wash¬ 
ington of Virginia hurried to New England to take com¬ 
mand of the other farmers who had shut the British up 
in the city of Boston. To the same rendezvous sped the 
nineteen-year-old Aaron Burr, forsaking his law books. 

Washington took him into his family, but threw him 
out again for some unknown reason; and could never after¬ 
ward endure him. Yet Burr found time to be both a bril¬ 
liant officer and a brilliant flirt. He shared with Benedict 
Arnold the horrors of the invasion of Canada, and dis¬ 
liked and distrusted Arnold, never dreaming that he would 
be linked with him everlastingly as one of his country’s 
detestations. While Burr guarded the American lines in 
Westchester County with splendid zeal, he indulged himself 
on occasion in amorous foray. At night after retreat was 


22 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


sounded he would ride many a dark mile to the Hudson 
River, tie his horse’s feet and fling the animal into a row¬ 
boat, then hold it there while the oarsmen ferried him 
across the wide river; then he would untie the horse s feet, 
stand it up, and ride it deep into New Jersey where the pretty 
widow, Mrs. Prevost, awaited him. After due communion 
with her he would ride back again, transport his horse again 
and gallop into camp before reveille, ready for another day 
of battle. He learned thus to live on small snatches of 
irregular sleep. 

When the long war was over Burr married this mid¬ 
night Mrs. Prevost and she bore him a wonderful daughter, 
Theodosia, whose fate and fame were as different as pos¬ 
sible from Betty’s. 

Aaron Burr’s chief delight in life was the education of 
this daughter to be an honor to her sex. What education 
Betty had from her father was of the exactly opposite 
trend. He left her to be provided for by her mother in 
the only trade that Phebe seemed to understand. She kept 
her three children with her, even in the evil resort called 
“the old Gaol House,” which was managed by a negress 
named Margaret, ex-slave of a Major Fairchild. Black 
Margaret and her black and white clientele finally offended 
the citizens so that they gathered in a mob one night and 
pulled the house down upon the heads of the inmates. For 
purposes of modesty the mob was fashionably disguised in 
Narragansett Indian garb. 

That must have been a dramatic night for little Betty, 
but it seemed to have taught Phebe no lesson; for three 
years later she was before the Town Council again and 
was sent to jail again. Betty and her sister and three 
other little girls were sent to the workhouse for a month. 

Two years later Phebe was recalled by the fondly in¬ 
terested Town Council and relieved of her children again. 
John was apprenticed to Asa Hopkins, whoever he was; 
Polly was turned over to Henry Wyatt, and Betty to one 
Samuel Allen, otherwise not famous. 

At this time Phebe’s husband was recorded as “some- 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


23 

time dead.” A boom had, indeed, scraped him off his boat 
into the harbor of Newport and eternity. 

But the indomitable Phebe went right on with her destiny 
of adding to the population of Providence; a year or two 
later she gave Betty a half-sister whom she called Lavinia 
Ballou, in honor of somebody—probably old Major Ballou, 
the complacent husband of the complacent Mother Ballou. 

The Town Council continued to take an interest in Phebe, 
and the workhouse was her frequent domicile. At the age 
of thirty-three she married Jonathan Clarke, a shoemaker. 
He had been a soldier in the Revolutionary War and he 
loved liquor and literature better than cobbling. He brought 
with him seven children by an earlier helpmeet to add to 
Phebe’s three. 

He also was a frequent visitor to the Town Council 
and shortly after the honeymoon he was there “again” 
with his bride. The “again” is eloquent. This time the 
Council peevishly resolved that Jonathan and Phebe “be, 
and they are hereby, rejected from being inhabitants of 
this town.” 

The Council urged them to go to Boston. But then 
Providence had never liked Boston since Roger Williams 
was so scurvily entreated there. 

But Phebe and Jonathan and their children did not care 
for Boston, any more than Boston for them. Jonathan 
had been there. So they settled down on the old Warren 
Road just outside the limits of Providence, with their 
children about them like field mice. Then Phebe turned 
witch, that is, she hunted the fields for herbs and greens 
and peddled them through Providence in a little hand cart. 

Betty, already shapely and blond and fifteen, lived in 
a hut and accepted the bread of charity from a baker’s boy, 
who remembered long afterward, in his old age, how pretty 
she was, and always hungry, always holding out her hand 
for cake—or for bread when there was no cake. 

Doubtless Betty paced the dismal streets with her mother 
and climbed the hills of Providence, calling “Yarbs and 
greens!” Doubtless she pushed the ugly cart along the 


24 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

ruts. Perhaps it was thus that she gained her longing for 
a carriage to ride in, and horses to pull it for her. 

After a year or two of peddling fresh weeds Betty fol¬ 
lowed her mother’s footsteps and took her green young self 
to market. She slept at the home of the butcher’s wife, 
“Old Mother Ballou,” prophetically named “Freelove,” and 
devoted to the same art that Queen Mab practiced among 
the fairies. 

There being no public schools and no truant officer 
to enforce education, and the factories insisting that chil¬ 
dren work from twelve to sixteen hours a day, whatever 
their age, Betty preferred to peddle her blond graces up and 
down the town and to study geography and finance and 
social economics with the slave traders, the whalers, the 
packet sailors, the tallow chandlers and whom not? 

Her sister Polly also padded the streets of Providence, 
but she died young and was packed off in a coffin knocked 
together by the disreputable Solomon Angel. Betty died 
old in well-worn splendor. 

For a time Phebe and Jonathan and their litter lived at 
Rutland in a sodden dugout in the side of a sandhill. But 
Phebe’s feet wearied for the damp, long street of Provi¬ 
dence and its far-traveled visitors. 

At last she and Jonathan grew desperate enough to re¬ 
turn from banishment. The Town Council promptly 
snapped them up, thrust them into the new jail, and sen¬ 
tenced them to be whipped “upon their naken bodies.” This 
torture they were permitted to evade if they took themselves 
out of town within three hours. 

In their pitiable dilemma some kindly skipper must have 
befriended them, for they sailed away to the North Carolina 
mountains. 

But trouble was waiting for them, and they were soon in 
court again; this time in the novel capacity of complainants. 
They sued their landlord for invading their premises (per¬ 
haps in a vain quest for the rent). They were denied even 
this last luxury, for the court docket of 1798 states curtly 
that the case was “abated by the death of the plaintiffs ” 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


25 

It occurs to Betty’s historian, William Henry Shelton, 
that they became “conveniently dead, as sometimes happens, 
in the mountain settlements, to troublesome plaintiffs.” 

And that is the story of Phebe Kelley. She had a busy 
forty years doing unheroic things in the heroic days of the 
nation. There were thousands of her sort equally busy, but 
they have gone down into the absolute blank, where Phebe 
would have sunk if it had not been for her runaway child 
and the trouble her glory created. 

It was not from Betty that these things were learned. 
She concealed her mother’s history as carefully as any pur¬ 
ist could have done. She never would acknowledge why she 
left Providence or what she left behind. She never even 
explained how or where she got the ten dollars it cost to pay 
her fare to New York. 

Perhaps her mother gave her some unpoetical advice 
based on her own bitter experiences with life. In all the 
bitterness of occasional sobriety Phebe must often have 
looked at Betty with eyes that saw coldly clear her own 
past as her daughter’s future unless some change took place. 

In the hovel where they lived and where the old stepfather 
soldier slept off his potations, Betty must have looked like a 
dunghill lily, which Phebe must have felt it her duty to 
pluck and fling far out into the distance. 

She must often have parodied Polonius’s advice to his 
son with some such wisdom for her daughter: “Betty, 
child, take warnin’ by me and don’t you go the way I been 
goin’. I never had no chance and you ain’t got much unless 
I can learn you the moral of shif’lessness. 

“Git money, honey; git money! Go where money is and 
lay holt on it one way or another. It’s the only thing that 
matters. It ain’t likely you’ll come by it honest, for there 
ain’t no honest trade for a woman except marriage, and who 
would marry you out of the ditch? So go where they don’t 
know you; go as fast as you can, as soon as you can. And 
if anybody says 'ditch,’ pertend like you don’t know what 
the word is all about. 

“Forget me, honey. Deny me. It’s the biggest favor you 


26 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 

can do me, for nobody will have you who knows of me, and 
I’ll rest easier, drunk or dead, if I can imagine you’re far 
away and dressed good and sleepin’ in linen. If I could 
know you was in a carriage, I’d smile if you drove right 
acrost my grave. 

'‘There ain’t no virtue in rags and dirt, and silk is heaven, 
no matter what they tell you. I had a silk dress once; a 
sailor stole it out of a cargo from China and gave it to me. 
Oh, God! but it felt sweet around my body! Git silk! git 
silk, honey! 

“The only Don’t I want to give you is about liquor. Don’t 
drink like I always done; don’t consort with drinkers. Seek 
out the men that keep their powder dry. 

“It ain’t likely that many men will offer you honest love 
or talk marriage talk unless they’re beggars, too. Don’t 
waste your lips on poor folks’ cheeks, and don’t give your 
kisses away for nothin’. You’re too pirty, baby, to go dirty 
and cheap like I’ve always went. 

“Beauty is your money, child, and beauty stays with the 
misers that knows how to keep it and make it work. So 
go on outen this mis’ble town and find a market where they’ll 
pay for what you got to sell. 

“But don’t you go till you pass me that rum jug before 
your pa dreens the last droppy. I give you a nice face, 
honey, and now I’m givin’ you the best advice I know. Kiss 
me good-by and don’t believe anything I tell you when I’m 
ugly sober.” 

For once, a daughter took her mother’s counsel to heart 
and built her life on it, with results that stagger the codes. 


CHAPTER V 


A ND all this long while Betty has been waiting for the 
packet schooner to be off. The glum hills and ebon 
buildings of Providence stood piled about her like the heap 
of gloomy memories that made her past. 

Henceforth she would unremember them. She must down 
them in her heart; deny them if they rose up against her; 
avoid or silence any witness who would not forget. 

The need arose at once, with the approach of Betty’s half- 
sister, Lavinia Ballou, who had come aboard with Betty and 
was more kin than kind. Lavinia came up from the cabin, 
where she had been dozing on the floor with a girl named 
Teal, also a bad one from Providence. 

“What you standin’ here freezin’ and broodin’ for?” 
“Because I want to. I’m not askin’ you to freeze with 
me, am I?” 

And then the vinegar of Betty’s look turned to sudden 
molasses, for she saw her Captain Dellycraw. 

He had a black man to carry his trunk and his bundles, 
and he swung aboard as if he were used to bigger ships 
than this. He was warm and claret-cheeked in spite of the 
cold, and cheerful despite the dark. He must be a sea 
captain. 

He saw Betty where she stood under a nodding lantern 
that painted her on the gloom in the few ruddy high lights of 
an unfinished portrait. 

He recalled her at once as he had seen her watching the 
stage draw up at the inn an evening ago. He paused to< 
say with elephantine playfulness: 

“Pardon me, citizeness, is this your ship?” 

“No, sir, but I wisht it was.” 

“I’ll buy it for you if you want me to.” 

27 


28 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 

“You didn’t even buy me the stage.” 

He loved her way of giving him the lie, and without delay 
or apology thrust around her a sleeve as big and shaggy as 
a cinnamon bear’s arm and with almost as much muscle in¬ 
side it. Betty’s shoulders yielded as if her bones were of 
willow, and this pleased him as much as the iron of his 
brawn pleased here. They seemed to complement each 
other to perfection. 

He growled gently: . 

“If I bought you a ship, what would you do with it? 

“Sail off to France.” 

The promptness of this startled him. He studied her with 
a less transient interest: 

“I own a ship that sails to France every now and then. 
Will you accept a berth on that?” 

“Yes, sir.” 

“You are a quick one, I vow. Well, you can be my first 
mate. Er—no—I have a first mate that lives in France. 
You can be my second—or I forget what number.” 

This cynicism did not frighten her. She laughed so 
learnedly that he was impelled to bend and kiss her a hearty 
smack. 

“I’ll see you again when I’ve stowed my stuff below. 

“All right, Captain Dellycraw.” 

He paused and turned: 

“How did you know my name was Delacroix?” 

“I heard a nigger call you that.” 

“Oh! And how do you like the name?” 

“It’s beautiful!” 

“Want to wear it—on this side of the ocean?” 

“That depends. I’m tired of my own.” 

“Well, we’ll talk it over after breakfast. Keep this to 
remember me by till then.” 

He kissed her again. And she gave him a kiss like honey 
with a bee sting in it. It almost knocked him over. He 
reeled lurching down the steps, laughing no more, almost 
sighing with her beauty and her savor. 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


29 

Betty stared after him so triumphantly that Lavinia, who 
had been watching from the shadows, cried out: 

“Good Lord! Betty Bowen, if you’re a-goin’ to begin that 
business all over again, you needn’t expect me to speak to 
you no more.” 

“That would be too much luck for one momin’.” 

“Lettin’ a man kiss you, the first time you meet him!” 

“It wasn’t the first time! I met him last night. He 
pinched my chin then.” 

“Lawd-a-mercy! but you are a regular hussy, ain’t you ?” 

“As long as he never kissed you, what you squawkin’ 
about?” 

“Well, I do declare! If you ain’t the brazenest thing! 
But it’s all a body could expect of a girl who would run off 
and leave a little-” 

Betty’s hand went out to Vinny’s throat and the word on 
its way up went back down her windpipe. Betty’s voice 
was low and murderous: 

“If you speak of that again to me, Lavinia Ballou—or to 
anybody; if you so much as even look it—killin’ you is the 
least I’ll do to you!” 

Vinny could only promise in dumb show and gurgles, 
her eyes apop, her knees so weak that Betty* had to hold her 
up while she throttled her, snarling: 

“Take your oath on that!” 

Vinny’s hand went up like a witness’s, then came down 
and crossed her heart violently. She verified the oath ver¬ 
bally as soon as she was permitted to be articulate. 

And she kept her promise as long as most oaths are kept; 
and for the same reason. 

Frightened almost to death by this fierce and unsuspected 
Betty, she went below and stayed there until seasickness 
made her its very own. She left Betty breathing as if she 
had been running. And she was running—away. It shocked 
her to find that she had brought along as a companion a 
fool who was all for blurting out all of Betty’s secrets before 
the boat cast off its cables. 

Betty was paralyzed with despair. Then in the sky where. 



3 o THE GOLDEN LADDER 

as Pierre had once quoted, “I’humide nuict guide ses noirs 
chevaux” the black became a blush; the blush a long line 
like a red mouth pushing through a veil. 

Poor Pierre! Must she forget him, too? Yes, she must 
entomb him with her other relics. She was done with him 
and she hoped she was done with “hunger, cold, and blows, 
disdain and obloquy” (“Le faiwi, le froid, les coups } les des- 
dains, et Pin jure.") 

The drowsy sailors bestirred themselves. Captain Curley, 
the ship’s commander, began to bustle and call, to smash his 
fist into stupid faces, to threaten the lazy with flogging. 

That word “flogging” made Betty’s white shoulders 
quiver. She had seen many a girl stripped to her hips in 
the public eye. She had seen the lash go up and come back 
hissing like a snake to slash the snowy shoulder blades and 
curl venomously round the post with a sharp nip at the 
breasts where they were squeezed against the wood. She had 
wondered how long she could escape the agony. But now, 
please God, she would never lift her chin in the market place 
and yelp like a dog, or slink away with a back all striped and 
bloody and sticking to her dress. The public of Providence 
should never see her pretty ribs crisscrossed with welts or 
gloat on her nakedness for nothing. 

Make haste, you lazy sailors, and haul those cables in! 
Draw back the plank and let the boat go free! 

The outgoing tide took the keel in its hands and drew it 
south. The helmsman was suddenly busy. The schooner 
came round. The booms swung across the deck with a 
broadsword slash that almost knocked Betty overboard in 
her father’s footsteps. 

Gloriously the sails outswelled the breasts of great swans 
and became the wings of angels heavenward bound. The 
water was lyrical; the schooner rolled over on her side like 
a basking white-bellied shark, then righted herself, and rolled 
on her other side, in sheer delight of sun and sea. The 
prow bored and twisted forward. 

Providence fell behind until even the incoming tide of 
day could not make it more than a blur. It sank below the 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


3 i 

water and was drowned from view. Betty spat at Provi¬ 
dence and prayed that a tidal wave might erase it from the 
earth. 

Captain Delacroix and the even more fat and florid sun 
came up about the same time and brought Betty equal cheer. 
Betty did not care now that the wind grew lazy and whim¬ 
sical and hardly more than fondled the canvas. 

She was devoting all the arts she had acquired in her only 
school to the conquest of Captain Delacroix; and it was 
really to her advantage that the thirty miles to Newport 
were not covered till the long day was long dark, till ten 
o’clock indeed. For this gave her a chance to be afraid and 
to require the Captain’s protection. 

She would not kiss him good night, however, when he set 
her ashore and found her a room at an inn. She said she 
had been wicked to kiss him that morning. Even the watch¬ 
ful Lavinia could find nothing to complain of in Betty’s ob¬ 
servance of the proprieties and the timidities. Lavinia was 
wretchedly disappointed, though she saw through the wiles of 
the purring cat and wondered that men could be such nin¬ 
nies. The Samsoner they were, the easier the Delilahs found 
them! 

The next day being the Sabbath, the schooner could not 
sail, of course, and Betty went to church, of course. Betty 
always went to church. A visiting clergyman who came in 
on the same packet occupied Doctor Hopkins’s pulpit and 
preached on the text, “This is the victory that overcometh 
the world, even our faith.” Betty’s victory would overcome 
the world, particularly our faith in righteous precepts. 

In the afternoon, Captain Delacroix, who could not have 
been hauled to church with kedge anchors, asked Betty to 
take a drive with him. 

She could hardly believe her ears. She was going for a 
ride in a carriage! It was an ungodly thing to do on the 
Sabbath, but the daughter of Phebe Kelley was on the 
way up. 

Betty hardly saw the State House, still suffering from 


32 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

its use as a hospital by the British and the French during 
the war; the old stone mill, or the mansions. She hardly 
noted the sea from the cliffs or the breakers pounding them¬ 
selves to froth on the beach. 

The pleasant surf of the rumbling wheels and the clop- 
clop of the horses’ hoofs were music enough to her. She 
tried to assume a carriage face and to look as if she had 
never walked a step in her life. She even let fall a hint or 
two to the effect that she had Capetian blood in her veins. 

She tested the Captain’s credulity by saying that she loved 
sea captains because one had been mighty kind to her when 
her mother died on her way to the West Indies from France. 

And the Captain swallowed it without a gulp! 

Remembering that the heroine of Pierre’s romance had 
been reared in Newport, she tried to fill her memory with 
scenes. She stealthily inquired, as if having forgotten, the 
names of houses; repeated to herself the names of prominent 
people—the Wantons, Wickhams, Cranstons, Godfreys, 
Brentons. 

Captain Delacroix had been in Newport during the French 
occupation and he told her stories of D’Estaing and Roch- 
ambeau, whose headquarters in the Vernon house he pointed 
out, and of Admiral de Ternay who died in Newport and 
was buried in Trinity churchyard; and of Washington’s visit 
there with Lafayette, and of the beautiful Miss Champlin 
whom Washington danced with so heartily, while the French 
officers played them a minuet; of the handsome Misses 
Hunter and the Quaker girl, Polly Lawton. 

She learned of the amazing Viscomte de Noailles, who 
was to be Napoleon’s superior officer later, and Berthier, 
who became his friend; of Lauzun, whose head had just been 
chopped off by the Revolutionists, and the Marquis Chas- 
telleux; of de Broglie and Vauban, and of Talleyrand, the 
chameleon. 

The child was so distraught by the bliss of riding in a 
carriage and discussing the famous and the rich with a 
captain who grew more and more afraid of her as she grew 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 33 

less and less afraid of him, that she ended her first voyage 
on wheels with a prodigious headache. 

She returned to her chamber, leaving the captain to puzzle 
his big thick head over what a contradictory creature she 


CHAPTEU VI 


M 'i )NDAY in a bud day; November is a miserable month; 

and it in always darkest before tbc dawn. And here 
it was before dawn and Monday, and a November Monday, 
and a rainy November Monday morning before dawn. And 
yet Hetty Tin wen's heart was an full of comfortable song ns 
a teakettle on a bob. 

Two mnrnlngM ago and she was a lorn/ fugitive from Provi¬ 
dence with a heart I till of secrets and bates and as many dc- 
NjHdrs as a pretty young girl can feel. 

Now she was traveled. She. bad already been to New¬ 
port. She bad already ridden in a carriage. She lmd a 
rich old gentleman sulTcriug agonies of adoration. 

Hetty was all for the old gentlemen now. She had had 
her lili of young love with no pence in pocket and little to 
oiler Imt wild sweet perils, with wildly bitter perils in the 
aftermath, 

Now she was happy, though she must dash from the inn 
at halt past live in the morning with no galoshes and no 
umbrella. A strong, windy rain thrashed the black road 
between hoi and the dock, and there were her bundles to 
carry. Hut even while she cowered on the sill, Captain Dela¬ 
croix sang out across her shoulder; 

“You're not counting on risking those pretty little feet 
in all that mud?” 

"I low else would l get to the packet, mon enpitauicf" 

"beet like yours, um belle, were made for carriages, and 
l have one waiting for you if you'll do me the honor of let 
ting me share it with you.” 

“Oh, Captain Delacroix, quel pleasure!" 

She slipped that time, hut at least she did not call him 
“Dellycravv” any more. She Frenchified it now as “Dullak- 
34 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


35 

wall” with the little rippling “w” that Pierre had taught 
her. It delighted the captain, though he was more Ameri¬ 
can than French. But he knew his Paris and was on his 
way thither again after a brief necessary visit to Boston. 

It was thrilling to huddle in the dark with a great man. 
What mattered it that they were shaken together like the 
dice in a dice box? 

Her gallant whipped her from the carriage to the deck of 
the schooner under the shelter of his greatcoat, and though 
this implied his putting an arm about her, she nestled into 
it as shyly as if she had never learned how to take care of 
herself; as if she were indeed the helpless, inexperienced 
idiot a well-bred girl was supposed to pretend to be. 

As she sat on the edge of her berth to wait for sunrise 
and breakfast she peeked out into the cabin lighted by a 
gloomy lantern, and saw Lavinia Ballou stagger down the 
steps. She was soaked through and homely as a drowned 
rat. 

Lavinia’s propriety had got her properly drenched and 
neglected, and Betty was so glad of it that she had to smother 
her giggles in her pillow. 

Furthermore, Lavinia would have the pleasure of sleep¬ 
ing on the cabin floor upon what scant bedding she had 
brought with her. 

Betty had expected to sail on the same terms, but Captain 
Delacroix had insisted on paying the captain of the sloop for 
a berth for her. He had a stateroom of his own and offered 
her that. She had refused, of course, with blank innocence, 
but had finally consented to accept a lower berth to quiet 
him. 

And now she had a cubbyhole of her own, with a frilled 
red bombazette curtain for decency’s sake. She fell back 
and stretched herself out, writhing deliciously as any warm 
cat on a sunlit sill. She fell asleep and was awakened by the 
call to breakfast. 

There were several preachers of various denominations 
aboard—a Presbyterian, a Methodist, an Episcopalian, a 
Universalist, a Burgher, an Anti-Burgher, and a Camero- 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


36 

nian. And all of them wanted to say grace at once. Peace 
was made by Captain Delacroix, who suggested that they 
draw lots and take turns. Since nearly everything religious, 
political, educational, and civic was done by lottery, this was 
agreed on; and a Cameronian asked the first blessing. 

But this did not affect Betty’s appetite, though she kept 
her eyes down in all demureness. Their lids were as thick 
upon her eyes as clotted cream on blueberries; but she could 
somehow see through them that Captain Delacroix was 
staring at her—saying his graces to her. He was like most 
of the men of the day, a Deist or something terrible like that; 
but she knew that, however impious a man may be, he likes 
his women religious. And Betty was religious before she 
met him, so that there was nothing dishonest in her piety, 
though it always adds a bit of thrill to do a virtuous thing 
for a low motive. 

When the blessing was asked and the food began to go 
the rounds, Lavinia shocked Betty by saying to the captain, 
“Mister, will you please shove the salt, please?” 

Betty was beginning to tune her ear to nice diction and 
she could tell by the swift quirk at Captain Delacroix’s lip 
that “shove the salt” was somehow wrong. She resolved 
never to use the expression. She made many good resolu¬ 
tions as a result of studying Lavinia. 

Lavinia dipped her fingers in the shoved salt, but before 
she could sprinkle it on her meat she turned a sudden green 
and bolted up the steps on an important errand at the rail. 
Other passengers followed and none came back. 

The schooner was riding now the long ground swell that 
borders the ocean. On top of these vast rollers there was a 
hubbub of little breakers. But Betty had never a qualm. 
The boat was somehow like a carriage and her heart danced 
with it. 

Later she took a keen delight in watching through a port¬ 
hole how the waves raced past, as if in a panic to get away 
from the rain that stabbed their frothy crests. 

The schooner went bravely ahead all day, “slicing the 
sea,” as Marlowe said, and to Betty, who had never heard 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


37 

of Marlowe, it was as if the schooner’s keel were the long 
upper blade of a pair of shears, with the lower blade in¬ 
visible. All day and all night the keel kept scissoring the 
endless green fabric of the waters. 

Getting round Point Judith was terrifying, but the good 
thing was that the wind helped. It was not a following wind; 
indeed, it blew against the boat; yet by a clever scheme called 
“tacking” the schooner zigzagged forward. Captain Dela¬ 
croix tried to explain it to Betty. She was much puzzled, 
but she learned a lesson she used to her profit thereafter: 
Even when the wind is against you, you can make its very 
opposition carry you to your destination if you will keep 
close hauled and keep on tacking. 

Betty did not care how much the winds of life blustered 
so long as they carried her forward over no matter how 
turbulent seas. And she would tack when she had to. 

It was too stormy to stay out on deck for conversation 
with Captain Delacroix, and the passengers filled the cabin 
so thickly and so odiously that there was no chance for any 
more intimate conference than could be held by two pairs 
of eyes exchanging glances that grew to stares. But Betty 
knew that she was more eloquent, more interesting to the 
captain in her silent beauty than she could have made herself 
by any prattle. 

That night she slept in a rapture of adventure among the 
creaking timbers and the creaking passengers, the waves 
pummeling the ship in vain and the wind making the rigging 
a great harp of rope, in all the joy of sleeping in a strange 
bed that was going somewhere with her. 

The other passengers flopped in their berths uneasily, or 
rolled about on the floor like loose logs in the hold of a 
lumberman wallowing down from Maine. 

Betty, peering out for a last survey before she gave herself 
to sleep, noted that Lavinia was snoring with her mouth 
open and a singular awkwardness of attitude. Even in her 
sleep she kept twitching her blanket about her, as if anybody 
cared what she looked like. 

Next to Lavinia sprawled a woman like a group of hills. 


38 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

Across her fat arm was the head of her little daughter, who 
slept on a pillow of bright yellow hair. A pretty child it was, 
a little girl of seven. Her mother, Mrs. Pennery, was taking 
her to Philadelphia. Betty had heard her admit that she 
was a Quaker. Yet she had been in Boston. 

These were the days of equality for you! Betty had often 
heard her mother say—her mother was a Massachusetts 
woman when she could not help herself—that Massachusetts 
people had once treated Quakers worse than thieves. They 
had stripped even the women and whipped them till they 
bled and sometimes died. 

Rhode Island was more generous. It had only recently 
decided to let the ministers of the new church called Method¬ 
ist perform marriage ceremonies! 

And yet Rhode Island had persecuted Betty’s mother and 
Betty herself, and driven them both outside her narrow 
borders. 

Betty wondered what the future held in store for the 
pretty little Quaker girl. She wondered what the future 
held in store for herself. Something beautiful, she dared 
believe. 

She fell asleep in hopes that were bettered by her dreams. 
She was just riding away from a remarkable palace in a 
gilded carriage drawn by fourteen white stallions when the 
carriage began to careen and the gilded coachman let out a 
yell of fright. 

She woke to find herself, not in a ditch, but sprawling 
along the wall of her almost vertical berth. The schooner 
was on the lee tack and heeled far over. She could hear the 
water boiling right under her. The man in the berth above 
her (or rather alongside her, since the boat was almost on 
beam ends) was howling, “Lord God A’mighty, help, help!” 

Betty heard Lavinia and the Teal girl shrieking, “Murder! 
Fire! Thieves!” She heard rather than saw a panic in the 
cabin. 


CHAPTER VII 


S UDDENLY the schooner veered and tilted the other 
way, and the people rolled about like a shifting cargo— 
a cargo of caged and frightened animals. 

Betty was shot to the opposite side of her berth and almost 
over the edge. By the dull glow of the wide-swinging lan¬ 
tern she saw what made her laugh even in the face of death. 
But one of the sailors, who had run down with a bright lan¬ 
tern, ran up again to escape from visions that shocked even 
a sailor. 

The passengers were sure that the ship was sinking or on 
fire, and they were making a mad scramble to escape without 
pausing to figure out where they were to escape to. Betty 
decided that if she must drown she would drown comforta¬ 
bly in her berth. 

But from all the other berths, from the staterooms, and 
from the floor the passengers were girding themselves for 
flight to nowhere. It was odd that they were all trying to 
be as decent as possible in their last hour. While their 
minds were paralyzed, their muscles by separate instincts 
were pulling on clothes, blankets, anything. So much for a 
life of training. 

One fat-legged woman was vainly endeavoring to step 
into her lean husband’s too tight knee-breeches, while he was 
trying to find his head again in her fathomless petticoats. 
Others half naked, were holding their hands about them for 
costume and letting themselves be hustled in all directions 
for lack of hands to check their fall. Betty mocked at such 
a silly decency. But then she could stand disclosure better 
than most of the others. They were concealing their hu¬ 
miliations rather than their prides. 

Children bawled, mothers screamed, and men cursed while 
39 


40 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


the lodger over Betty’s head, wakened by his own noise and 
that of the other passengers, forgot the nightmare of his 
sleep and wondered if he were really awake. 

He peered over the edge at Betty and called down: 

“What’s matter?” 

“It must be Judgment Day,” said Betty and stared at him 
without any waste of modesty. Then she saw that Captain 
Delacroix was in his stateroom door. He had torn off his 
nightcap and had no wig on. He was handsome in spite of 
it and had hair of his own in plenty. His blacksmith arms 
were hirsute, his chest was bearded. 

He was not ashamed of his brawn, but began at once to 
cow the cowards, knocking the men about and handling the 
women with firm courtesy. He finally convinced the pas¬ 
sengers that the schooner was in no danger of sinking, and 
order was gradually renewed. All the people at once grew 
so furiously angry at the man who yelled in his sleep that 
they seemed to be disappointed at being robbed of the ex¬ 
pected death. Then they grumbled themselves to sleep as if 
they had never heard of danger. 

The next day the rain stayed in a sky as full of dirty 
gray wool as if all the sheep shearing in the world had been 
done there. The wind was cold and razory, but Betty and 
Captain Delacroix enjoyed a lurching stroll until a Presby¬ 
terian minister struck up one of David’s psalms from the 
quarter-deck. Whereupon the Universalist began to chant 
one of Winchester’s hymns on the forecastle. A Methodist 
commenced an exhortation from the lee of the caboose house. 
The passengers who had no other diversion divided them¬ 
selves among the sects; but Captain Delacroix and Betty, 
driven below, found the cabin empty and began to get better 
acquainted. 

Betty had the captain puzzled. He said, after many 
experiments: 

“I don’t know whether you’re the knowingest witch in 
Christendom or just the poor little orphan you pretend 
to be.” 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


4i 

“Knowing is such a big word,” Betty sighed. “I know 
nothing, I’ve seen nothing, I am nothing! Nobody!” 

“Well,” said the captain, “I’ll do my best to remedy your 
deficiencies.” 

Then he explained very bluntly: He was lonely; she was 
lonely; put two lonelinesses together and you have good 
company. If Betty cared to confide her fortunes to his 
hands, he would look out for her in New York and take 
her to Paris and back. 

“In a word, ma belle , I’m offering to be your protector.” 

Betty rolled her sky-blue eyes at him and murmured: 

“My protector? Is that the same as husband?” 

“Au contraire! Well, hardly!” 

Those limpid orbs baffled him. Like most men, he hated 
not to be as bad as a woman permitted, and he equally hated 
to make a woman any worse than she already was. He 
dreaded to let a minx fool him, and he hated to make inno¬ 
cence wise. He stammered: 

“Well, a protector is like a husband except for one slight 
detail—there are no marriage lines, no ring, none of that 
sort of thing.” 

“Oh!” said Betty, having a hard time to keep her pro¬ 
found knowledge of life from exposure. “I’m not sure I 
know just what you mean, but if I do, I don’t see why you 
call that protection. I should think it was just the opposite. 
Who’s to protect a poor girl from her protector?” 

“Well, I’m damned!” the captain groaned. “I beg your 
pardon! Forgive me, my child. We’ll say no more about 
it, if you please.” 

He wandered away in a muddle, and Betty, watching him, 
wondered if she had not overplayed her cards and fright¬ 
ened him off. 

Still, the voyage was not over yet, and she understood by 
instinct that it was clever to keep a man anxious. She went 
hopefully up the steps to the deck. 

All morning the wind increased, grew colder and colder. 
With twilight came flocks of snowflakes. Frost flowered like 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


42 

a pallid moss everywhere, incrusting masts and rigging with 
silvery foliage. 

The sailors’ hands and feet grew numb and they were of 
little help to Captain Curley, who bellowed his vain orders 
with a growing anxiety, multiplied in the breasts of the 
passengers. 

The waves were swooping now and plunging under a 
wind of maniac rage. It was fearsome to see them rise out 
of the night as if from ambush, and run right over the 
frightened little schooner like French mobs storming about 
a rocking dump-cart full of condemned prisoners. 

The sailors tried to keep the passengers below, but they 
stifled with the confinement and choked with anxiety. The 
fat Quaker, Mrs. Pennery, fearing that she would smother, 
lumbered up the steps with her daughter Susanna and ven¬ 
tured to set foot on the wet planks. Just then, as if her 
weight had determined it, the schooner heeled over till the 
deck was a precipice. Mrs, Pennery’s hands were wrenched 
loose from their hold and she went sliding, bouncing, shriek¬ 
ing down the rail. Before she struck it a livid wave rose 
over the side, dipped down a green arm, picked her up, and 
raced away with her into oblivion. 

The few passengers who watched and the captain and 
the sailors were struck dumb with horror. There was no 
hope of finding the poor soul. Even if the captain had dared 
to put about with his frozen crew, the icy waters must have 
dragged their victim down at once. 

No one shouted, ‘‘Man overboard!” No one made a move 
to launch the small boat. Only the little daughter, who had 
peered from behind her mother’s skirts, gave forth a cry 
of mad fear. She began to scream and beat her hands to¬ 
gether and call: “Mamma! Mamma! Come back. Don’t 
go! Come back!” 

She put out vain hands to the sea and the world to return 
her mother, but the only answer she had was another wave 
that raged along the deck as if in search of the child. 

Betty caught the girl in her arms and hustled her down 
into the cabin, and did her best to comfort her. The other 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


43 

passengers gathered about with words of sympathy, but 
Susanna was afraid of them and drew closer to Betty, cling¬ 
ing to her with hands so tight they hurt. 

There was a strange, sad delight for Betty in the supreme 
compliment of the child’s trust, and she became a mother 
at heart for the first time. 

For hours she soothed the orphan and whispered to her 
and got her at last to sleep in her berth. Captain Delacroix 
watched her with eyes unwontedly tender, and the other 
passengers praised her softly among themselves. 

But Lavinia, creeping close under pretext of looking at 
the little girl, sniffed: 

“Ain’t it funny how much nicer other folks’ children are 
than-” 

“I warned you once!” Betty whispered, smiling for the 
benefit of the others, but making a claw of her right hand 
for the benefit of Lavinia, who felt those nails in her throat 
and fell back with a shudder. 

She went on falling, for the schooner pitched forward 
like a diver, then sat back slowly on her stern as a mighty 
sea broke over her and wrenched the lifeboat away, splin¬ 
tered the caboose house, and, smashing through the cabin 
lights, poured in a flood of water that drenched the dismal 
people on the floor. 

Lavinia swashed around with the other flotsam, and, hav¬ 
ing made the grand voyage of the cabin, brought up in a 
heap. Betty, high and dry, laughed aloud at the picture 
Vinny made. 

That breaker was the final salute of the storm. The sea 
still ran high, and now and then a wave clamored along the 
deck; but there were no more disasters. 

The cold, however, was by now so intense that the frozen 
sails stuck to the masts where they flapped against them, and 
the cordage was congealed in a tangle. 

The passengers shivered and Betty was driven into her 
bed with her clothes on. Susanna cuddled close and slept 
sobbing. And Betty slumbered like a Madonna, dreaming 


44 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

that the orphan was a babe of her own, feeding at her or¬ 
phaned breast. 

The next day the sky was bluely clear of snow and the 
sea as guileless as only fierce-tempered beings can look. The 
passengers went out and joined the various preachers in 
hymns of thanks to Providence for its gracious protection, 
though Betty mumbled to Captain Delacroix: 

“If Providence meant to protect us, why did it have to 
give us such a scare and take so long about it? Why did 
it take that nice mother away from her child and leave that 
useless Lavinia Ballou?” 

“You love riddles, don’t you?” said Captain Delacroix. 
“But it seems to be your only vice. I like you very much 
and Fd like to protect you really from the world. I wish I 
could ask you to marry me; but there’s an obstacle in Paris. 

He gazed reverently down at her, and Betty realized 
that there are also rewards for being good. She did not 
know what to say, but he took her gratitude from her eyes 
and went up to the deck. 

Betty would have followed, but the little Quaker girl would 
not let go of her hand. For a long while she waited in a 
turmoil of wraths at the way the world was treating her. 

She had not, after all, left trouble behind her in Provi¬ 
dence. It had come aboard with her, and new troubles 
sprang up to meet her like the waves that rose at the bow as 
fast as they fell away aft. 

At last, when she could bear the repose no longer, she 
coaxed Susanna to mount with her to the deck. The child 
looked at the smooth sea and wondered aloud: 

“Is mamma down there somewhere, do you think?” 

“Your mamma is in heaven, my pet,” said Betty, 
angelically. 

Her mood changed on the instant, for she saw that Cap¬ 
tain Delacroix was leaning on the rail, listening intently to 
Lavinia, who was gesticulating indignantly and gabbling 
away at full speed. 

A puff of wind brought Betty the words she hardly needed 
to hear: 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


45 

“I thought it only right and proper you should know 
them things.” 

Betty’s right hand made ready to scratch and throttle, 
and she would have sprung forward to bundle Lavinia over¬ 
board. But her left hand was warmly engaged with the 
soft fingers of the child, and she was helpless. 

It was a bitter thought that her devotion to this orphan 
had betrayed her into the power of her enemy. Betty was 
learning much on this voyage, but not much in favor of the 
rewards of virtue. 

She turned and went back to her berth. Susanna was 
willing enough, for she was horrified by the bland merciless¬ 
ness of the dancing sea. 

Betty sat dejected on the edge of the berth, answering 
Susanna’s eager questions about heaven with as much or¬ 
thodoxy as her fierce mood permitted. 

Captain Delacroix went by to his stateroom and paused 
only long enough to say: 

“Mothering comes naturally to you, doesn’t it, my little 
innocent ?” 

Betty turned pale and lowered her eyes. She did not see 
that the captain paused in his door a long moment to study 
her. She did not hear him sigh because of her exceeding 
loveliness, or note that he closed the door with as much 
tenderness as is possible with so rigid a thing as a door. 

Lavinia did not come down. She stayed above near the 
rail, ready to leap over it to save her life. Betty, however, 
was flaccid with despair and nausea of the world. She 
could not have harmed even Lavinia. 

It turned out that Lavinia had not really destroyed her, 
for that afternoon, when Susanna slept and Betty went up 
to drift along the deck, too numb to observe that Lavinia 
slipped down the steps at once, Captain Delacroix suddenly 
drew close to Betty where she paused by the rail and mused 
upon the big emptiness of the world. 

“I know all about you now, missy. You’re a clever one—■ 
what the Yankees call ‘mighty slick.’ But I like you none 
the less—a little more, maybe. I don’t mind a girl’s being 


46 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

smart if she’s pretty enough to make up for it. And you’re 
that.” 

Betty stared at him in genuine innocence of what he was 
driving at. He groaned: 

“What’s behind those eyes, anyway ? Damn it, but they’re 
as deep and empty as that blue sky! And as reliable.” 

Betty’s silence was bewilderment, but it looked like pro¬ 
found wisdom, and the captain groaned on: 

“You’re cute, but I’m liberal. I’ve traveled. You’re so 
pretty I don’t care what else you are so long as I can look at 
you. Come along of me and I’ll show you the world, and no 
questions asked so long as you play fair. Will you?” 

He saw Betty turn pale. He saw that she breathed fast, 
but he could not tell whether she were afraid of his Satanic 
insult or dazzled with the beauty of the temptation. 

Before she could answer, the little Susanna came crying 
from the cabin and ran to her, seizing her arm and interpos¬ 
ing herself between the two forms, pushing the burly satyr 
from the slender nymph. 

Here at least was innocence of which the captain was as¬ 
sured. He could not bargain across that child, and he walked 
away. Betty could not hate Susanna, though she had 
wrought as much ruin as Lavinia. She stood caressing the 
arms that clasped her fiercely and straitly. 

The captain made no further approaches. He avoided 
Betty all the long moonlit evening, while the passengers sang 
together in knots about the deck, hymn warring with hymn 
and the Congregational chant from the cabin making such 
curdling discord with the tunes above that the sailors at the 
forecastle set up a ribald ditty of their own to save their 
ears from the pious racket of the rival creeds. 

The next day there was a doleful calm. The schooner 
could not find breeze enough to curve the sails; they wrinkled 
and slatted in peevish restlessness. Still the captain did not 
come near Betty, and she went almost mad with Susanna’s 
eternal questions and amazingly unimportant gossip. 

Nightfall led on a swift wind that got behind and drove 
the schooner ahead at such speed that the morning brought 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 



Long Island abeam. Into the Sound the boat scudded with 
many other sail in company, strange vessels from all the 
seas, slipping into New York or away. 

But the Gate of Hell was yet to pass. Here the wide 
waters must crowd through the narrow and twisted channel 
between Long Island and Ward’s, and they were torn by 
sharp rocks, thrown every which way into whirlpools, and 
currents whose course no pilot could foreknow. 

The preachers sent up to heaven much good counsel which 
for once was not contradictory, and whether it were God or 
Captain Curley that guided the course the Swiftsure flashed 
past the Hog’s Back and, whirling round the Gridiron, wor¬ 
ried through the maelstrom encircling the Potrock, while 
women screamed, children clung to their parents, and men 
repented their sins or regretted their virtues. But the Swift- 
sure got away without a scratch into the calmer waters be¬ 
low, and the souls returned to their habits. 

By and by New York began to march forward with her 
superb horizons framing her Italian sky. The blue river 
was so untroubled by the light wind that the schooner seemed 
to stand still while the city swung closer and closer. Fields 
and marshes gave way to homesteads and stately residences. 
The buildings congregated together and gradually aligned 
till they made a long wooden parapet loopholed with windows 
in an endless row. Above the city four spires pierced the 
sky. Below and before the houses, wharves ran out in an 
endless serration of blunt teeth. The East River, as they 
called the Sound down here, was populous with shipping, 
with frigates flying foreign colors, with brigs and merchant¬ 
men, with fishing smacks and ferries, wherries, ketches, 
barges, and canoes. There was still danger at sea from the 
British and French privateers, but there were more vessels 
than at Providence to dare the chance. 

At the end of the town stood a great garden of trees still 
graceful in their bare rigging of November. Farther down, 
like the dot under an exclamation point, stood Governor’s 
Island, which had lately been fortified by volunteers, by col- 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


48 

lege boys from Columbia, by Tammany Society men and 
others, in expectation of an attack by the British navy. 

The majesty of everything overawed blue-eyed Betty. 
Here she was at last at New York, and it frightened her, a 
lone young girl bringing nothing from home except disgrace 
and disgust and nothing to sell but another pair of blue eyes, 
another pretty mouth, and another tall, slim figure. From 
what she could learn, the city was already oversupplied with 
such merchandise. 

There was no witch to whisper her that one day she would 
own. vast quantities of this city’s priceless land, and inhabit 
a demesne more stately than any in the town. 

She could only know that she was a stranger in a strange 
realm. There were forty thousand people here and she had 
not a friend among them all—nor on the boat a friend ex¬ 
cept the child that clutched her hand and waited for life to 
do with her what it might. And the moment the schooner 
was made fast to the wharf the little Pennery girl broke 
from her and ran to the dock screaming: “Papa! Papa!” 

She flung herself into the arms of a Friend with a broad- 
brimmed hat and when he cast his eyes about in search of 
her mother, the child began to sob and to point blindly into 
space. 

Betty bent to pick up her own luggage. It was no heavier 
than her heart. She had not even a child’s hand to hold in 
her own. 


CHAPTER VIII 



S the passengers flowed molasses-wise along the deck 


to the plank and across it to the dock, Betty was jostled 
among her bundles, with never a hand to help her. 

She heard two New Englanders saying: “It tuk me two 
weeks to come from Prov’dence last time. Lucky to git 
here in only five days from Nooport this time.” 

“Lucky to git here at tall.” 

“If you’d ’a’ minded me and tuk the stagecoach we’d a 
missed gittin’ ourselves well-nigh destructed.” 

“Yes, and ben six days on the rud at best, not to speak of 
the li’bility of gittin’ killed by hosses runnin’ away. I come 
once by stage, and half of the time we was out in the rain 
tryin’ to boost the wheels out of the mire. And a feller 
showed me one of the ferries where the hosses got restive 
and jumped off into the water and draownded every last soul 
in the coach.” 

“Well, anyways, we’re in New York.” 

“Where you allowin’ to stop?” 

“Mrs. Loring’s boardin’ haouse up to number one Broad¬ 
way is abaout the best place. They tell me they’re buildin* 
a new huttel called the City Huttel with a slate roof onto it. 
But Mrs. Loring is high enough for me—seven dollars a 
week for board and lodgin’! Beats all!” 

“Well, if you will have style, you got to pay for it. I’m 
going to King’s Little Tavern next the Presbyterian church 
in Wall Street.” 

“Well, if you’re so elegant as to lodge in Wall Street, 
you’d best ride. They tell me they got hackney coaches naow 
in Noo York that carry you anywhere you want to go. Ever 
ride in one ?” 

“Never did.” 


49 


50 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


“I’m allowin' to try it once before I go home, just to 
have suthin’ to boast on when I git back.” 

Betty thrilled at the prospect of taking such a ride her¬ 
self, though she did not plan to return to Providence to 
boast. She was startled when Captain Delacroix shouldered 
near her and mumbled back of her ear: 

“I'll be at the Bull's Head, if you come to your senses.” 

Before she could answer him he was flinging his things 
into a hackney coach. She might have gone with him if 
she had not been so slow in reaching her “senses.” 

It was bitter for Betty to see him ride away, and to go 
on foot—especially as she shifted from one heel to the other, 
wondering where she could go. 

She and Lavinia had planned to share a room at the es¬ 
tablishment of Major Rapelye, a veteran of the war, who 
supported his wife and children by keeping a boarding house 
in Cherry Street. But now Betty would not stop under the 
same roof with Lavinia. Remembering the name of King's 
Little Tavern in Wall Street, she resolved to try that shelter 
and trudged across the wharf to Front Street and down 
this noisy road reeling with drunken sailors and laborers, 
past the Fly Market, to Wall Street, and up to the tavern. 
Here she was regarded with suspicion aggravated by her 
beauty. 

An old Frenchman in ruffles of point lace and a big wig 
stared at her with approval; a Southern planter ogled her 
and paid her the tribute of taking his segar from his lips as 
she passed. Foreign travelers of varied estate, cattle drovers 
and mariners from many a sea, paid the tax of a pleased 
regard. 

The room she was led to by a slave had only two beds in 
it, and she hoped to escape the usual experience of finding a 
strange woman lying alongside her in the morning when 
she woke. In some of the rooms there were four or five 
beds, but lone women were rare and the inn was not crowded. 

The prospect was dismal; her future as barren as the walls. 
She counted her money over, and the necessity of replen¬ 
ishing her gaunt purse was urgent. 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


5i 


She walked outdoors to escape the prison of her room. 
The sights of the strange city fascinated her, yet maddened 
her with envy, made her willing to venture upon any sacrifice 
to achieve pride. She had not been schooled to prudery or 
even to modesty. What she despised in her past was its 
cheapness. Her high resolves all concerned themselves with 
getting a high price. She offered herself at vendue in the 
slave market, but no common bidder should carry her off. 

Many men bespoke her and were frozen with the blank 
stare of her slow blue eyes. They fell back ashamed, never 
dreaming that what pained her was not their invasion of her 
innocence, but the poverty of their attire. 

She did not know that the modest home at 58 Wall Street 
was the domicile of General Alexander Hamilton, who' ad¬ 
mired but could barely endure the General Washington 
who adored him. She trudged dolefully across the road be¬ 
fore the City Hall, which had been Congress Hall when 
President Washington had driven to it in a coach drawn 
by six white horses with their pelts powdered and their pol¬ 
ished hoofs painted black. How Betty would have loved 
them! 

Trinity Church barred the way before her, new-built since 
the fire and surrounded with graves. She heard a man say 
that there were a hundred and sixty thousand dead in that 
yard, including thousands of nameless patriots buried thirty 
feet deep in tiers of trenches dug for them by the British 
when they held the city. 

She paused under the great tree at the comer of Broad¬ 
way and Wall Street. To the south was Bowling Green, 
then the Battery, and then the sail-flecked bay. But she had 
had enough of water, and she turned north under the trees 
along the filthy cobbles where the swine wallowed and the 
cows browsed or meditated their cuds. Off to the west she 
caught glimpses through the leafless gardens of a wide river 
that she supposed to be the Hudson. 

The yard about the big brick house of General Knox ran 
all the way to the stream. The red mansions in their flower¬ 
less closes were interspersed with taverns and a few shops, 


5 2 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

for commerce was creeping even into this graceful lane of 
homes. 

She stared at the house where President Washington had 
lived until they moved the capital over to Philadelphia four 
years before. 

But New York was recovering even from that blow, 
hastening forward in business and in beauty. 

Foreigners said that there was not a handsomer street in 
the world than Broadway. It was paved with cobbles now 
from Bowling Green to Murray Street, and Betty in her 
progress soon came to the new brick sidewalks that ran clear 
to the park. They were wide enough to let two lean men 
pass, A year ago the town had begun to number the houses, 
there were so many of them. 

And it was barely eleven years since the British marched 
out, leaving only ten thousand forlorn souls in a region of 
ashes and ruins. 

Now the streets were athrong with splendor. Liveried 
coachmen went by, lording it over the phaetons and the open 
chairs the poor rode in. 

Betty could not afford even an open chair or the single 
sorry nag that pulled it. She had not a horse to ride and 
she stood and stared like a beggar at one of the great ladies 
who paused at the curb to chatter from her saddle with 
another in a chariot. The horsewoman was Mrs. Jay, just 
in from Bedford; and the charioteeress was Lady Stirling. 
But neither of them noticed Betty—yet. 

The wide hoops of the ladies crowded her immodestly 
narrow skirts toward the gutter. Gentlemen, in three-cor¬ 
nered hats perched on snowy wigs with long beribboned 
queues, strode by like marquises, and probably were, for 
the city was swarming with foreign nobility. Many of the 
men carried on their arms baskets filled with their purchases 
from the markets. But they carried them grandly. 

Mixed with the gorgeous gentlemen in blue-silk coats and 
yellow-silk breeches were the new republicans, the Jacobins 
in the new fashion of long pantaloons and short wigs and no 
powder. The crows were driving away the birds of bright 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


53 

plumage, as usual, and trousers, being the ugliest garment 
ever worn since the drawers of the Trojans, had undoubt¬ 
edly come to stay. 

Betty felt herself a frump in her Providence best, which 
was hardly as good as New York’s worst. She slunk along 
as furtively and as cravenly as any of the cats that scampered 
out from under the splashing wheels of a passing coach. 
They did not always escape for long; the town had recently 
been laughing at a poem called “The Dialogue of the Dead,” 
made up of the conversation of the dead cats and dogs that 
cluttered the gutters of New York. 

Trying not to stare and gape like a yokel at the grandeurs 
she beheld, Betty followed the sidewalk out past the new 
home Mr. John Jacob Astor had just finished near the 
park. 

She would have liked to rest awhile, leaning on the rail¬ 
ing about the green space where they were going to build a 
new City Hall some day, but she had known too much of 
prisons and workhouses to relish the gray walls of the 
Bridewell where the imprisoned debtors were picking oakum 
in expiation of the sin of poverty; the gray walls of the high- 
towered jail where the culprits of other sins abode; or the 
gray almshouse built above the old burial ground of slaves. 

She sauntered on a little into Great George Street, which 
they now included as part of Broadway. It was unpaved 
and hilly from here out. She climbed to Catherine Street 
and looked down upon the Collect, the fresh-water pond 
where half-frozen men and women were fishing and children 
setting little ships afloat. Before long Mr. Fulton would be 
running a toy steamboat there, and making at last a success 
with the invention John Fitch had devised but failed to sell. 
Beyond were wide, ugly marshes and still beyond, the Lis- 
penard meadows, and groves and homesteads. 

Ofif there in the distance lay the beautiful country houses 
of Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, two lawyers and 
politicians, alternately rivals and colleagues. No pull of fate 
yet hinted that Burr’s and Betty’s lives would be united in 
the dim future. She was a wandering wanton. He had been 


54 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

already a soldier, a senator, an attorney-general, a supreme 
court judge, and he would soon be tied with Jefferson in 
the vote for President of the United States. 

Just now he was mourning the recent loss of his wife, 
who died of cancer in spite of all his efforts to find a cure 
for her or even relief for her pain. If she had not died he 
might have had a very different fame, for he had adored her, 
he had written her while she lived, “It was a knowledge of 
your mind which first inspired me with a respect for that of 
your sex.” And now he gave his soul to the training of her 
namesake, Theodosia, who worshiped her father. 

Strange that such a man as Burr should come at last to 
a port in the life of such a woman as Betty, after two such 
amazing voyages! 

Broadway ran on and on up hill and down for two miles 
more, but Betty turned back into the crowds, taking with her 
no premonition of her destined splendors. 

How it would have quickened her leaden heart to know 
that the future held in store for her more wealth than Broad¬ 
way could boast. All the lands and houses along that street 
had been assessed at less than a hundred thousand dollars 
the year before; and one day she would own thirty times as 
much. 

But now the only land she possessed was the dust upon 
her, the dust so thick in her throat that she went to one of 
the pumps in the middle of Broadway and pushed through 
the slops about it to get herself a drink. She had to drive 
off a fat, swilling hog, but a neat and gallant Frenchman 
seized the pump handle from her delicate fingers. He was a 
handsome fellow of some thirty years and he spoke in a voice 
that reminded her of Pierre’s. He said, as he handed her 
the cup he had filled for her: 

“Pairmeet me, ceetizeness. Yes?” 

“Thank you very beaucoup, m’seer!” 

“Non, no, please; not monsieur, but citoyen, Ceetizen 
Genet.” 

“Are you Citizen Genet?” Betty gasped. 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


55 

“Yes, I am it,” he smiled with an apologetic lift of his 
shoulders, and, touching his hat, walked away. 

He was a bridegroom of but a week's duration and his 
courtesy to Betty was pure philanthropy. Perhaps he un¬ 
derstood her lonely humility, for he, too, had been brought 
low. 

So that gracious gentleman was the archfiend who had 
torn the new republic almost to pieces when he came as min¬ 
ister from the still newer republic of France, with his liberty 
caps, his heroic diatribes against patricians, and his new 
fashion of calling people “citizen” and “citizeness,” or 
“citess!” 

His evil fame had even reached Providence, for he had 
almost brought on a civil war, splitting the country into two 
camps of ferocious enemies. Had not ten thousand people 
paraded the streets of Philadelphia, threatening to drag “the 
British tyrant, Washington,” from his house and set up a 
new president because he refused to permit Genet to raise 
troops for a war on England? Had not a dear old parson, 
hearing that the French women of the street had contributed 
part of their earnings to the Revolution, cried out, “I could 
hug the wicked sluts” ? Had not all the styles been changed, 
till the wearing of knee breeches and powdered wigs was 
held to be a crime against liberty, equality, and fraternity? 
And yet when Genet defied Washington he went too far. 
In a foreigner the insult was sacrilege, and the Americans 
gradually turned against him. Then his party in France, 
after swallowing the monarchy, was itself swallowed by the 
Jacobins of the Mountain, and the Citizen Genet became a 
mere citizen afraid to go home. 

Still, he had found solace in the arms of love and only a 
week or so ago he had married Miss Clinton, the daughter of 
the Governor of New York; and now he was an out-and-out 
American. 

But Genet's influence on the styles did not end with his 
own vogue. 

The good old times were going fast, and Betty wondered 
if she had not been born too late to live beautifully. Even 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


56 

the women were covering their legs (hitherto bare under 
their skirts) with the long loose horrors called “trousers.” 
IWhich reminded Betty that she ought to be wearing them. 

She drifted to the everlastingly fascinating art gallery of 
the shop windows. Pearl Street was one long torture for 
her. She reveled in it like a starved hermit in a cave, seeing 
visions of paradise. 

The very names of the fabrics were forbidden music. She 
had a woman’s intuitive scholarship in textures and models. 
She did not need to read the cards describing the visible 
luxuries just off the ships—cambrics, and long lawns, wide 
linens, velure and Barathee, changeable and plain man- 
tuas, thread lace, thread of Rennes, Kerseymeres, Scotch 
threads and britannias, figured and stiffened satins, silk 
mercery, and colored Barcelona handkerchiefs, silk gloves, 
silk stockings, and red-rosetted shoes of celestial-blue satin, 
and silk and oilskin umbrellas, enamelled watches, perfumed 
hair powders and perfumed pomatum, shalloons, durants, 
dorsetseens, and moreens, taboreens, rattinets—what not and 
why not? 

She stood by the shining windows that played her a 
doubly cruel trick; they not only reflected her own shabby 
image, but they transmitted the beauty of the wares they 
protected from the wretch they tempted. 

Her heart filled with rage at poverty and the harsh pre¬ 
cepts it enforces on the honest. Her soul cried out that she 
must possess beautiful things. The declaration of womanly 
independence gave all women an inalienable right to life, lux¬ 
ury, and the pursuit of gorgeousness. 

She went back to her hotel and flung herself along her bed 
in a fever of longing. If anything could be better devised for 
driving people to desperate acts for the sake of companion¬ 
ship and distinction than a barren hotel room in a strange 
city, it is not on record. 

But how could Betty gain prestige except by following 
the path her mother had trodden?—only with a more careful 
choice among the multitudinous fellowships awaiting a pretty 
woman. 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


57 

After tea at the tavern, where she had given her name as 
Miss Capet of Newport, she went out alone into the dark 
streets, lighted only from the windows of the houses and by 
occasional oil lamps. 

She found her way to the town’s one theater. Unattended 
women were not numerous, but not unknown, and she had 
her first glimpse of that immoral world, the drama, which 
the preachers in town were trying to drive out of its sole 
refuge, the one theater in New York. Actresses, Betty had 
heard, earned great fortunes and sometimes married titles. 
But she had no gift of mimicry, not a jot of the dramatic 
sense, and she felt that this avenue was utterly closed to 
her. She could not sing or teach. 

The only honest roads open to her were the dreary alleys 
and bypaths of the seamstress, the shopgirl, the segar seller, 
the cook, the chambermaid, the laundress, the crossings 
sweeper; and none of those promised more than a niggardly 
existence without future. Besides, the slaves did most of the 
tasks that the wives and daughters left undone. She could 
not compete with the blacks. 

She stole back to her room and, in a cell as bleak as a 
nun’s, fell on her knees and prayed—prayed!—but not for 
submissiveness, not for patience until a heavenly reward 
should be vouchsafed. She prayed for pride and material 
glory on the earth, and at once. 

She wept, too, but not for benefactions omitted, nor for 
sins that she had done. She wept for the sins she did not 
know how to commit profitably. 

She fell asleep when the passionate tears glued her eyelids 
together, and she woke in a cold mood of unimpassioned in¬ 
telligence. Remembering the words of Captain Delacroix, 
she rose grimly, made herself look her best, and, after 
breakfast, inquired of her landlord the shortest way to the 
Bull’s Head Tavern. 

Fearing that he was about to lose a guest, he sent her in the 
wrong direction. There were four hundred and eighty-four 
taverns in New York that year, but at last Betty found the 
one she sought. And just in time. 


CHAPTER IX 


H ER search for Captain Delacroix led her far up town, 
out along the Bowery Road to a district that reminded 
her of Providence, for a cluster of slaughter houses scented 
the air and wrung the delicate scrolls of her nostrils with a 
familiar distress. 

Yet this was that famous Bowery where, as Doctor Fran¬ 
cis wrote, “our graceless Knickerbocker ancestors danced 
around a maypole while the Puritan Anglo-Saxons burned 
witches at Salem.” 

Betty wondered why the captain should lodge so far from 
the waterfront in this haunt of cattle drovers and cattle 
murderers. But it was also the haunt of the horse gentry, 
the rat-baiters and cock-fighters, and the captain was a keen 
sportsman. 

Every pleasant day at one o’clock the horses raced up and 
down the Bowery, with their owners straddling their hocks 
in light sulkies. The prize was bought by the total of all the 
sixteen-shilling entrance fees. After the run, the owners 
went down to the river bank, and at the Belvedere House, 
owned by a club of thirty-three gentlemen, discussed on the 
broad balcony their liquor and the stout hearts of their horses 
and the beauty of the scene. 

Raw as this day was, Betty’s path was blocked by a pair 
of squatting teamsters setting a pair of roosters at each 
other, while a knot of idlers stood about watching the feath¬ 
ered duellists fence with their beaks and make flying back¬ 
slashes with their spurs in a little snowstorm of bloody 
feathers. 

The cruelty nauseated her, but the spectators were too 
fiercely intent to move aside for her until they were scat¬ 
tered by the tempestuous arrival of the Boston stage making 

58 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


59 

a grand dash to its halting place at No. 17 Bowery Road. 
What a strange idea, putting numbers on houses! 

Betty paused to see the passengers released from their 
week’s punishment. This very stage had.left Providence on 
the same fateful day that saw Betty take the packet. 

The poor landlubbers had been called at three every morn¬ 
ing and had been jounced along the billowy, rutty roads till 
ten every night, except for such time as they spent waiting 
by the chill roadside while the boozy driver mended the har¬ 
ness with rope or pleaded for help to extricate the wheels 
from the mire. The coach was packed like a codfish sloop, 
for the commerce between New York and Boston was in¬ 
creasing so rapidly that the two stages and twelve horses now 
in use would not much longer suffice. 

The passengers were dirty and lame, and so cramped that 
they groaned aloud as they straightened their tortured backs 
and limbs. They plainly hated one another and themselves, 
and the poor overdriven horses were such jades as even Betty 
could not admire. 

Having beaten the stage passengers to town by a whole 
day, Betty looked at them with the amused condescension 
of an old inhabitant for a band of immigrants. 

Then she dismissed the parvenus from her mind and 
moved on to the Bull’s Head Tavern, a homely building of 
two stories and a garret pierced by dormer windows stuck 
out of the slanting roof like spyglasses. 

She glanced into the barroom fitfully lighted by the leap¬ 
ing flames in a great fireplace, almost hidden by a semicircle 
of cattle-drovers of all ages, of stablemen, farmers, and 
butchers, facing outward as they warmed their posteriors, 
and spat tobacco juice and comment on the thieving worth¬ 
lessness of the politicians and the insults the country was 
tamely enduring from both the French and the British. 

Betty slipped into the women’s waiting room and beckoned 
to a fat old waitress, who went to find news of Captain 
Delacroix. She brought back word that he had gone to the 
Fly Market to buy a sea-going cow of Mr. Henry Astor, 
but he ought to be right back. 


6o 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


She was interested in Betty, but, failing to learn anything 
either by open cross-examination or artful traps, she talked 
about herself and the great people hereabouts—Mr. Henry 
Astor, for instance, who was so rich now and so poor once, 
and owned the beautiful house just up the lane a piece, and 
owned a stall in the Fly Market and bought no end of cattle; 
but a good man if ever there was one. Hadn’t he set up 
a poor young brother of his in business, John Jacob, who 
had his house on Broadway now, and was buying furs from 
Montreal and shipping them to China and the good Lord 
only knew where else? But la! couldn’t she herself remem¬ 
ber the day when young Jakie Astor went with a basket of 
cookies and tea rusks and such like on his arm, selling them 
to sailors or anybody with a sweet tooth? 

Why, she could remember the day when President Wash¬ 
ington stopped right here at this very door of this very 
Bull’s Head for a mug of Bowery ale—and wouldn’t Miss 
like one for herself while she waited? No? Well, yes, the 
general stopped his horse in front of the tavern while he 
waited for the British to pull their flag down and get out 
of town. Somebody had greased the flag pole and there 
was a long wait, but, General Washington waited, and praised 
the ale, too. That he did. And a fine tall man, too. 

She and her father had been so happy when that grand 
soldier rode into New York after so many years. She and 
her father were patriots, of course, but they had to let on 
they were Tories. . . . But here’s the captain now. . . . 
“Captain, if you please, here’s the sweetest young lady ever 
I laid eyes on waiting for to see you.” 

She bustled out, and Betty turned her head with a shy 
readiness to be rebuffed as too late. But the captain had 
been mourning her more than he would admit, more than he 
knew. It was dull sailing across the ocean for forty or 
fifty days with nobody to talk to but sailors, and he had 
been dreaming of decorating his old boat with the charming 
Betty. 

He wanted to shout with joy at her sudden return to his 
eyes, but he was afraid to give her the advantage of that 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


61 


knowledge. So he frowned and drank her in as he would 
drain a glass of sherry, staring at her, savoring her bouquet; 
and then, as it were, tossing her off into his heart. 

She did not need to act confusion, for he threw her wits 
awry as he stepped forward and caught her up from her 
chair into his arms, lifted her till her feet dangled above the 
floor; and crushed her till she gasped: 

“And now you’ve broken the only pair of stays I have on 
earth.” 

“I’ll buy you a dozen pairs to have by you as I break ’em 
on the voyage.” 

“The voyage?” 

“The voyage! What else have you come to talk about 
but the voyage?” 

“Oh, I could never take so long a voyage!” 

“And what or who’s to prevent but yourself?” 

“Oh, but I have-” 

“Nothing to wear?” 

“Only what I have on and a few old rags at the tavern. 
But I wasn’t going to say that.” 

“There are shops enough in town.” 

“Oh, Lord! there are much too many, but the prices here 
are out of all reach of what few shillings I have left.” 

“What a pilot you’d make! You brought that heavy old 
lumber barge into the slip as handsomely as could be.” 

“I don’t understand you.” 

“Well, I understand you. And I like you no less for 
maneuvering so cleverly. You’d have made a great figure 
at the French court if they hadn’t destroyed the court. But 
there’s always a future for a pretty girl with a cunning brain. 
Would you have dinner here with me or would you make 
your foray on the shops before you eat?” 

“My foray on the shops? Haven’t I just told you that 
I am a pauper ?” 

“And haven’t I just told you that I am going to buy you 
everything you want, and damn the price ?” 

“Oh, Captain!” and she came as near to swooning as ever 
in her life. 



62 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 

And so their treaty was made, and, like most treaties, had 
little or nothing to say of the all-important principles in¬ 
volved. She went back along the shop windows of Pearl 
Street, but not now as the outcast peering in and slinking by. 
She peered in only to make sure of what she wanted, and 
then hurried through the door to handle and muse upon the 
fabrics. 

When she had to allude to the big man who stood back 
and let her hungry soul expand without thought of expense, 
she referred to him as “my husband.” And that was all the 
ceremonial there was. The shopkeepers took her word for 
their relationship, and took his cash for their own 
satisfaction. 

While she was prolonging the sweet anguishes of decision 
in one of the shops, Captain Delacroix hailed a hackney 
coach loitering along the street, and kept it for Betty’s serv¬ 
ice. Being a man of the sea and the wind, he was used to 
long calms and he did not fume at Betty’s delays. At last 
the coach was so laden with her purchases that when she 
had exhausted her courage and the daylight, she and Dela¬ 
croix were almost lost to view beneath the bundles. 

If she had any qualms of conscience, they were stifled 
instantly by the sight of her half-sister Lavinia Ballou beat¬ 
ing out a broom on the steps of a home where she had evi¬ 
dently taken service. Lavinia gazed at Betty’s cavalier and 
her trousseau as if she were bewitched. Triumph bred no 
forgiveness in Betty’s heart for the foiled assassin of her 
reputation. She muttered: 

“If only we could have run over that cat, my day would 
have been heaven.” 

Captain Delacroix left her at the King’s Little Tavern 
as if he had escorted Lady Stirling home. She was so 
rosy with ecstasy in her new wealth that he felt sad for 
her because of the inevitable brevity of all joy and all 
joyous beauty. He sighed: 

“I wonder what I am leading you to, my child?” 

Betty could think only of what he was leading her away 
from. Anything was better than that, and whatever it was 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


63 

to be, its preface was beautiful clothes and a voyage to 
another world. And so she anwered his solemn query with 
a chirp: 

“To paradise, I expect.” 

“I wonder. The sea itself is dangerous in winter. The 
British and the French privateers are both on the hunt for 
American vessels. Not long ago the British captured an 
American ship and flogged the captain on his own deck for 
his impudence. I’d not like that.” 

“I’d kill them if they hurt you!” said Betty, who did not 
believe in flogging. He smiled sadly at her pledge of pro¬ 
tection, but he went on with the catalogue of perils: 

“Even if we get to France without being sunk by a storm 
or a round shot, you may not be allowed to land. Ameri¬ 
cans are hated there now, because the French say that 
Americans betrayed them after they rescued America from 
destruction. And there’s another danger: My wife does 
not often come to port to meet me, but sometimes she does. 
And she—well, you’d better pray for a privateer to get 
you first.” 

“I’m not afraid of women!” Betty laughed. 

But he knew the hazards and he persisted: 

“I wonder if it’s wise to take the chance?” 

She answered with all the intrepidity of her soul: 

“It’s always wise to take a chance—if you’re lucky enough 
to get a chance to take.” 

She was as reckless a soldier of fortune, perhaps, as the 
fabulous Spanish Nun. The French half of Delacroix led 
him to shrug his shoulders. He lifted his hat high and 
bowed very low in deference to her gay bravery. 


CHAPTER X 


B EING a lady of wealth, Betty rode in a hackney coach 
to the wharf at the foot of Gouverneur’s Lane. She 
was taken out to the ship in a rowboat and the ripples kept 
reaching for her, but they could not drag her back. She 
came aboard with the mail. The Marie was a monstrous 
ship—or rather a “snow” of nearly two hundred tons bur¬ 
den. There was only one bigger vessel in harbor. 

As Betty watched her trunk come over the side—and it 
was a new trunk—she felt a queen. She had a stateroom 
of her own, too; and was so happy arranging her things in 
graceful security that before she had her trunk cleared she 
heard the anchor chains screaming. Her little world began 
to sway, the trinkets to slide about, the things she had hung 
up to swing as if in a wind. The floor beneath her eddied 
and she reeled in a drunken unsteadiness. 

She scurried aloft to bid America good-by. It grieved 
her a little to see the sorry group of wooden buildings at New 
York’s tip, and the gardens, and the high steeples of Trinity 
and St. George’s and the new Dutch church slowly dwindle 
and retire into mist. 

There was a sorrowfulness about the beautiful hills on 
either side of the bay retreating with their hamlets and 
spires, their groves, the coves and hills. Little islands fell 
back, too. Then the fleeing hills ran together again about 
the loitering ship at the Narrows, and made a lane along her 
path before they released her at last to the full sea. Now 
it was time to drop the pilot into the pilot boat that lurked 
between Staten Island and Sandy Hook and he and his boat 
slipped back into nowhere as if a rope drew them. 

The captain had hardly spoken to Betty, for getting out 
of the bay meant passing the customs, the quarantine, the 

64 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 65 

shoals, and the whimsical currents and the throng of other 
ships at anchor or on their various tacks. It meant the 
proper stowing of the cargo and breaking in the new crew 
according to the gentle methods of the time. The captain 
was the little god and father of the ship and he did not 
spoil his children by sparing the rod or the fist. 

When a negro steward fetching him a cup of coffee 
stumbled over a coil of rope, tossed the cup and contents 
overboard, and presented the captain with an empty saucer 
held out in a shuddering black hand, Captain Delacroix 
knocked him down, of course. When the fool got up the 
captain knocked him down again, set his foot on the fellow's 
neck, and stamped on it three times. When the steward, 
kneeling, begged for mercy, the captain kicked him down the 
sloping deck. 

A passenger, whom she came to know as Quentin Had¬ 
dington of Dalkeith, stood at Betty’s elbow during this scene 
and commented. 

“A trifle brutal, but somewhat national.” 

Betty, feeling that her nation was being insulted, 
answered. 

“The captain is only half American; the other half is 
French.” 

“Indeed!” quoth Haddington. “Then we may soon ex¬ 
pect to see a guillotine set up on deck pour encourager 
nous aulres.” 

Betty sniffed at this, but she was sorry for the steward 
and she hoped the captain did not treat his women the way 
he treated his sailors. She had known what it was to be 
knocked and kicked about by hot-tempered seamen in Provi¬ 
dence, and she did not like it. In spite of all the proverbs, 
she did not like it. 

Gradually the waves grew longer, larger, and of a more 
profound voice; the wind took on an oceanic purity and a 
strength in gentleness; the sky deepened, the world enlarged, 
and the sea swallowed the earth. 

The lighthouse on the long sickle tip of Sandy Hook was 


66 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


ahead, was abeam, was astern, was a little finger stuck up in 
the waters, was no more. 

Everywhere only ocean and heaven, the heaven a mob of 
Clouds, gathering to some ominous meeting place; the waves 
anxious and tumultuous, a vast populace throbbing with an 
irresistible emotion. 

Watching the big captain and seeing him watch the sky, 
Betty realized suddenly that he, for all his power and au¬ 
thority, was only a tiny creature in a tiny shallop on an 
awful ocean with a number of other midges dependent on 
his skill in besting the universe. 

What could he say or do to the sky and the sea to outwit 
them or persuade them to have mercy ? The boat had looked 
a mountain when she came alongside in her skiff. Now it 
was a curled autumn leaf skimming along on waves that 
spurned it because it was contemptible. And she was only 
a gnat on that leaf. What did a gnat’s vices or virtues mat¬ 
ter? Yet she was afraid. 

She wished herself again in Providence, in the old shack 
where her mother lived, or in the dingy refuge of Mother 
Ballou. She wished she were in a church somewhere, a 
church of stone in the shelter of a hill where the winds and 
waters could not reach it. 

She wished she had been a better girl. She wished she 
could run back across those lengthening waters to the safety 
of New York built on the firm rock. She wished it were 
not too late to be a good girl now. 

What if she told the captain that she could not go on with 
her wicked plan? He would laugh at her, no doubt, and call 
her virtue cowardice. And he would take away from her 
her pretty clothes. The very gown she wore must be sacri¬ 
ficed first, and the hat and the silk stockings, the silk trous¬ 
ers (hidden, but oh, so warming!) and the pretty shoes with 
the bright buckles, and all the gewgaws she had spread out 
in her cabin. The mere thought put a stitch in her heart. 

She could not pay her fare across. Even if she gave 
up her treasures, she could not work her passage as a man 
might do. 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


67 

No, she was committed to her fate, to the sea, the storm, 
the captain, and to whatsoever future awaited her in stormy 
France. 

She would be as good as she could, and try to save money 
so that she could afford to be really good hereafter. 

This thought comforted her and she said to Fate and the 
captain, “What becomes of me on this voyage is your busi¬ 
ness, not mine. After the voyage-” 

Well, the end of the voyage was on the other side of the 
horizon. And the horizon, like to-morrow, kept always just 
a little ahead. The stern of the ship might as well make 
plans for what it should do when it caught up with the 
prow. 

The captain gave her hardly more than a nod all day. He 
would not come below for any of the meals; but his battered 
steward had a place for Betty at the captain’s table, and told 
her to ask for any wine she wanted—not excepting cham¬ 
pagne. He whispered this last, for champagne was not given 
to the other passengers, though they had any other liquor 
they asked for, and the popping of corks was like a distant 
battle. 

Next to Betty sat Mr. Haddington. He complained of 
the extravagance of food and the number of meals—four a 
day! breakfast at eight, luncheon at twelve, dinner at four, 
and tea at eight. He called it “abominable sensual 
gratification.” 

The smoking annoyed him, too, and he told Betty that on 
his voyage to New York he had had a neighbor who smoked 
a hundred and fifty segars in a fortnight. He kindled them, 
when there was sunlight, with an elegant burning glass. Mr. 
Haddington abominated tobacco, whether smoked or chewed. 
But he snuffed it up his nose and made queer grimaces be¬ 
fore he sneezed and sprayed the air. Betty noted that people 
who were always complaining of other people’s vices usually 
had worse ones of their own, in addition to the ultimate 
vice of complaining of other people’s vices. 

Of the one hundred passengers aboard there were eighty 
wretches in the steerage and thirty in the cabin. Eight of 



68 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


the cabin passengers were women. And all of them by 
some instinct avoided Betty. 

Though the captain had not been seen with her, the 
women scented a. something about Miss Capet that the pious 
Haddington never suspected. And of course they could not 
be brazen enough to warn him. 

But Betty was used to the disdain of women and she 
rather welcomed it now. She much preferred the company 
of men, and took the scorn of women as a tribute of fear. 

All that day and all that night the captain did not come 
below at all. There was business enough above for him. 
He kept all the watches of the sailors on the run up and down 
the decks and up and down the masts. 

There were thunder and lightning and there were buffets 
of rain that came down in breaking waves upon the broken 
sea. 

But Betty had gone through a baptism of storm in the little 
sloop, the Swiftsure, with her captain as a passenger. Now 
her captain was the captain, and she lay in her berth and sang 
softly as a mermaid adrift, until she fell asleep. 

The first morning out showed her a world of water and 
sky, a bottle-green sea frothing everywhere with the suds of 
the beaten waves. For all their frenzy, they seemed to 
plead for respite, flinging up white hands of appeal, then 
bowing their shoulders and running from the yelling flagel¬ 
lation of the merciless wind. The sea aft was myriads of 
shoulders, shoulders whipped, fugitive. The oncoming 
waves were a horde of green dragons roaring, charging. 
But the ship slipped through them with her sails trimmed 
down and taut as steel, and the rigging shivering. 

When the captain spoke to the sailors in his voice of 
thunder they were more afraid of him than of sea or wind, 
for they leaped to their posts, dived into the very waves, 
monkeyed up the masts, sidled out on the yards, and fought 
the canvas though it struggled like roped pythons. 

The captain's eyes were wild with lack of sleep, and 
when he glanced at Betty he wa^ almost too weary to feel 
her beauty. At last she defied the stewards and the sailors 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 69 

and the captain’s own fierce gesticulation, and, gripping at 
whatsoever handholds she could find, made her way along the 
deck to where he stood. 

He watched her fighting toward him and let her make 
her fight, just to see what mettle she had and how much 
of it. At length she reached an open space with nothing to 
cling to, and the waves swept it. 

He thought this would stop her, but it did not. She 
fell back before a torrent of water that drenched 
her, but when it passed she must pierce a gust of wind that 
threatened to tear her clothes from her, and SO' pressed 
them against her that she came toward the captain as good 
as naked in her striding sculpture, with all her draperies 
swept back of her in a torment of wrinkles. 

There was a grandeur about her that stirred him. He 
was transfixed a moment; then, as he saw a comber pour 
over the side like a rush of pirates to seize and carry her 
away, he leaped to save her, caught her in his arms, and 
held her while the flood raced with them toward the waiting 
sea. 

Luck swept them against a backstay that went up to a 
careening mast, and with his free arm hooked about the 
ropes, he clung till the water was gone and the ship tilted 
the! other way and almost flung them into the opposite depths. 

He hauled her with him to the safety of his post, and 
hugged her tight while he cursed her for the imbecile she 
was. Only, he called it in the French fashion “ambayseel” 
and that made it gentler. When she laughed with a des¬ 
perate joy, he kissed her full and fair on her salty mouth, 
and she made no pretence of maidenly alarm. She gave 
him a siren’s kiss of equal courage and all the immortal 
challenge of grace to power. 

None of the passengers had dared to be abroad to see 
this courtship of two eagles defiant of the storm. None 
of the sailors dared to seem to witness it. 

But thereafter the captain made no secret of his alliance 
with Miss Capet. And the passengers were afraid to pro- 


70 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

test, for the captain was the Caesar of all the waters; he 
was their ruler and their one safety. 

Betty’s pride rose faster than her station. It was not 
long before she became almost unbearably domineering. 
The captain ruled the ship, but she ruled the captain. She 
walked the deck as if she owned it and the masts, the 
cordage, the servile crew, and the uneasy passengers. 

She sat and mused upon the very ocean with condescen¬ 
sion, her chin so high that she looked down across her 
lower eyelids upon the horizon. 

Behind her was a welter of flat, drab water like her 
sordid past; ahead of her was a sea of baleful glare under 
a sky of murderous intent. 

A tall cloud towered above a wall of cloud like the French 
prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville, in his crow-black hat with 
its hearse-like plumes leaning over his desk to search a 
prisoner with fatal questions. 

The ship went forward as solemnly as an emigre return¬ 
ing for trial, afraid of doom, but determined to meet it 
gracefully. 

The storm would wring the ship with questions and do 
its utmost to condemn it to death. 

Even if the ship escaped the lightning and the wind and 
the fangs of the waves, it must conduct her to that France 
where the air was electric with every danger. And yet Betty 
never had felt so happy in her life. She, the little pauper 
brat of a small-town prostitute, was out in the face of the 
hurricane in the middle of the wide, wide sea. If she died 
she would die in a glorious storm. If she lived, she would 
see tremendous further peril. She was going into the very 
core of the fiercest tumult the world knew. 

She was so exalted in her exultance that she looked down 
on the captain now. The bulky brute was fond of her be¬ 
cause she was pretty and cunning and pleasant to pet. He 
thought he was carrying her off like a purchased slave. He 
thought he was helping her down the road of destruction. 

But he was carrying her to some high destiny. The fool 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 71 

was nothing but a porter, a crossing sweeper to lift her 
over the mud. 

She would give him kisses and all her favors like the 
tips one gives a stage driver. And she was not robbing 
herself. She would have plenty of kisses and favors left 
for future servants of her destiny. 

Let Delacroix sail the ship well; for it was her ship and 
he was her captain. When she tired of him she would get 
another. 

There might be something, after all, in the story that she 
was a Capet of the royal line. The other Capets were in 
hiding—Philippe Egalite had just been beheaded for all his 
groveling before the mob. The little Dauphin Louis XVII 
was wasting away in a dungeon. And his fat, gouty uncle, 
who would one day be Louis XVIII, was waddling about 
Europe begging other frightened kings for shelter. 

What were the humiliations Betty had known compared 
with theirs? Why should she not rise as high? She re¬ 
membered a motto she had heard somewhere: 

“Rather than be a glowworm twinkling in a hedge, I 
would be a skyrocket. Let me perish so I be exalted!” 


CHAPTER XI 


HE breeze one day whistled a hall-remembered tune 



I against the sails, and the sea carried the hull along 
like a child perched on a friendly shoulder. The air was 
crisp enough to keep the flesh a little thrilled with cold, 
and yet it stirred the heart to keep the blood alert. The 
crimson simmered in Betty’s cheeks, her bright ringlets 
whipped about her throat and lips, and her eyes were keen 
with many ecstasies. 

A quick, rippling breath agitated her white breast, where 
regret and terror and hope and contentment made a tur¬ 
bulence that both delighted her and hurt. 

To have left New York so soon, and before she had more 
than learned to love it, was her one distress, and yet, though 
New York had forty thousand people to Providence’s miser¬ 
able six, she was bound for Paris, where there were five 
hundred thousand people! 

And, busy as New York was, it was a graveyard com¬ 
pared with Paris, where revolution after revolution had 
finally reached a climax of climaxes in the frenzy of the 
Terror. 

When she grew too cheerful, Delacroix tried to frighten 
her with pictures of Paris as he had left it on his last voyage. 
He said it was like a theater on fire; people were throttling 
and trampling one another to death lest they be throttled 
and trampled. It was a Protestant minister who had first 
proposed the Tribunal of the Terror, not knowing what 
demons he set free. The bewildered judges, feeling an 
apostolic call to duty, sobbed and wept as they condemned 
bewildered wretches to death. They got drunk on liquor 
to whet their stomachs for blood, and murmured “Guilty!” 
without knowing who was accused of what. 


72 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


73 


Once when Delacroix was sitting in a Paris cafe, a former 
tailor had come in and wandered among the tables, taking 
from his loaded pockets the cold ears of dead men and 
women. And he made the frightened women kiss them! 
He wore another ear in his hat for a cockade. In the south 
of France a gang of negroes and mulattoes, called “the 
American Hussars,” raided the country, raping and slaying. 

In Paris Delacroix had observed the serene old ladies who 
to( 5 k their knitting with them to the guillotine square and 
watched the heads drop without dropping a stitch. He 
told of those other terrible women who were paid to howl 
insults at the victims in the tumbrils. They were called 
les insulteuses and earned their wages in the least beautiful 
trade that history records. But the victims usually died 
with patriotic calm, clasping one another’s hands and mur¬ 
muring, “Adieu! courage!” and crying up to the waiting 
ax, “ Vive la republique!” 

All France was boiling with horror and glory. 

Carrier, at Nantes, bound men and women together, and 
priests and children, and sent them down the river Loire in 
barges full of holes. He drowned nearly five thousand 
thus. The beast Lajeune had a toy guillotine at home, and 
humorously decapitated the chickens he served for dinner. 
Barras said that when the Marquis de Sade was released 
from the Bastile, the whole nation took up an orgy of 
Sadism. Delacroix, standing near the guillotine one day, 
had seen them execute a boy of thirteen. He was so small 
that his head could only reach halfway through “the cat- 
hole” to the ax. He babbled, “Will it hurt much?” The 
blade had to be lifted after the first hideous blow and let 
fall again before it clove his little throat. 

The appetite for heads had increased with the harvest. 
The prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville, grew so impatient of 
the old-fashioned custom of calling witnesses to prove the 
guilt of the accused that he asked Robespierre to ask the 
Convention to pass a law dispensing with witnesses. And 
this was cheerfully done. And the guillotine flashed faster 


74 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


and faster till Fouquier reached the proud score of a thou¬ 
sand heads in one month. 

Paris was another hell on earth, and in the name of 
patriotism people had reached almost the fiendishness hitherto 
attained only in the name of religion. If something did 
not stop them soon, said Delacroix, they would put as many 
poor souls to death for imagined treason as had hitherto 
died in the name of heresy. , 

The poor were in power and were showing themselves 
nearly as indifferent to the sufferings of the rich as the rich 
had always been to the sufferings of the poor. The red caps 
had conquered the red heels. And yet they were not happy! 
In spite of all their massacres, the winter was bitterer than 
ever and famine prevailed. 

That was Delacroix’s one hope of being well received. 
His ship was laden far below the water line with things 
to eat. 

One day Betty was glad to have his blood-chilling chatter 
interrupted by the one man authorized to break in upon his 
voice. A cry came down from the sky. The sailor in the 
crow’s nest had descried a little open boat adrift across the 
course; and in it a man. 

The castaway was too weak to signal, and when the ship 
ran alongside and sailors lifted him out, he was all but gone 
from starvation and thirst and exposure. They put him in 
a berth and the women ministered to him till Betty joined 
them; then they fell away and left him to her care. 

She fed him with fresh milk from the cow that Delacroix 
had bought of Mr. Henry Astor and brought along. Just 
as the poor fellow was growing strong enough to cling 
to Betty’s hands and pour out his gratitude, Delacroix 
came down, ordered her away, and questioned the stranger 
roughly in French, learning that he was another of the 
many victims of the black insurrection in San Domingo. 
His name was Llie Laloi. He had been hiding and making 
his way slowly homeward to France through an Odyssey 
of misfortunes and delays. 

In the storm that had lately harried the sea, the fishing 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


75 

ship that was taking him to Newfoundland had foundered, 
and he was the only survivor of the boatload that had put 
away without provisions or water casks. The others had 
gone mad and leaped into the sea, but Laloi’s madness had 
been a resolution to live until he could return to the old 
grandfather and the young sister he had left in France. 

When he fell asleep, moaning with homesickness, Dela¬ 
croix left him and went to tell Betty what he had learned. 

“I leave it to you to find out more,” he said. “He may 
be useful to us in France, so you can be pleasant to him— 
but not too pleasant, remember! I’d hate to have to throw 
you overboard.” 

“Would you, if-” 

“Without a moment’s hesitation—or regret,” the captain 
answered. 

She knew he meant it, and took it as a compliment with 
a smiling, “Thank you, Mister Monsieur.” 

“Don’t use that word ‘monsieur’ in France. It has been 
erased from the dictionary. It is dangerous.” 

The captain’s jealousy gave Betty a little anxiety, since 
it is hard for a woman to be pleasant to a man and not be 
too pleasant, especially when she must satisfy a jealous lover. 
Sometimes, too, in being pleasant to a man, one grew so 
fond of him that promises and loyalties went down the 
wind with wisdom and caution. 

She would have felt safer if Laloi had been huge and 
handsome and tyrannical, for she already had one lover 
of that sort. 

But Llie Laloi was wan and afraid and poor and shabby. 

Pierre had been like that and her heart had gone out to 
him with her alms. She felt her heart tugging toward the 
newcomer. Her affection was all she had to give and she 
was spendthrift of it. She was in danger of forgetting her 
mother’s warning. 



CHAPTER XII 


D ELACROIX hated to carry a passenger who could 
neither pay his fare nor work it. This man he had 
plucked out of the midocean had never a penny aboard 
him, nor strength enough to pull at a hawser or peel 
potatoes in the galley. Betty pleaded: 

“Let him rest! He has had so hard a life ! He may help 
us to get into France and to be safe there!” 

“That depends on the way the wind blows, the day we 
land,” Delacroix grunted. “As like as not he may destroy 
us.” 

“But he has a cousin who is a deputy in the National 
Convention.” 

“And the National Convention may be all condemned 
or chopped to pieces by the time we arrive.” 

“It never hurts to be kind,” Betty persisted. 

“That’s a bad motto for a woman.” 

There was only one thing certain. France had had a 
bad harvest and was in need of the food Delacroix carried. 
Other ships in New York harbor had loaded their holds 
with wine cask staves for Bilbao, with barter to be exchanged 
for slaves, with things that they might sell in Singapore. 
The captain ahead of him at the customs was clearing 
for Surinam and told Delacroix that he might try to 
smuggle spices out of Batavia, though it was death to 
be caught and the Chinese who ran the spices were racked 
on the wheel. 

But Delacroix carried flour and cereals and was on his 
way to Le Havre. His foodstuffs ought to be passport 
enough for any government, provided only that the men in 
power would trade and not confiscate. 

And so, since he could hardly throw Laloi overboard, he 
76 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


77 


took him along “for ballast,” as he phrased it to Betty. 
Even when he was generous, he liked to pretend an evil 
or a flippant motive. 

There came a doleful period of fog when everything 
was dank and veiled in murk and the Marie seemed to 
be pushing through tons and tons of wet woolen blankets 
that swaddled the ship and made all the sea a mystery of 
invisible menaces. 

Betty tried to drive her eyes through the pall as if 
they were gimlets, but she could no more pierce it than 
she could peer into her future. 

There were always fogs off the banks of Newfoundland, 
Delacroix said, and there was nothing to do but push on and 
trust to luck. 

At last they emerged from the world of sea smoke and 
they had once more an horizon, forever far away, forever 
crinkled with tumbling waves. 

There were rainbows now in strange abundance; some¬ 
times five or six a day, and beautiful to a ravishment of 
the eyes. 

“It’s lucky we’re out here to see them,” Betty said, “or 
they’d be wasted, the poor, wonderful things! I can’t bear 
to think of beauty going to waste.” 

She did not intend to waste her own. 

Then in spite of the ancient perjury of the rainbows, 
there came rain: silk threads of rain on docile waves; 
arrows of rain on a large sea running; bayonet charges 
of rain driven by head gales that brought the waves down 
upon the deck like sledges. 

One afternoon there was a scare, indeed,—a fleet of nine¬ 
teen sail forging long in a squall—war vessels, too, from the 
line they held. Delacroix kept the Marie away before the 
wind to avoid these ominous birds of prey, and thought he 
was free of them. 

But when night fell he saw a false fire made, the usual 
signal of a war fleet. He wore ship at once, but saw the 
flares repeated here and there—everywhere, on all sides. 
He did not know which way to dodge, but put out all his 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


78 

lights and pushed on. At last the flares ceased to blister 
the dark, and he went below and undressed only to be 
called above again after midnight by wild voices on the 
deck: “She’s close aboard of us! We’re gone!” 

He dashed aloft in mad haste, and Betty followed him 
barefoot and in scantiest garb. 

She arrived in time to see against the dark a vast, mourn¬ 
ful ghost of a ship bearing down upon their own. Captain 
Delacroix flailed the air with a lantern and yelled at the 
top of his lungs. With his free hand he reached back 
to seize Betty’s arm and her flesh was black for days 
from his grip; but the ship swung off just in time and 
the night took it. 

Delacroix told Betty afterward that he had planned to 
hurl her aboard of the other boat as they crashed, because 
his own ship would have been cut in two and sunk. 

“Would you have come aboard with me?” she asked. 

“Certainly not! A captain sticks to his own timber.” 

Betty wondered at the queer ways of men. And she 
wondered what would have been her fate if she had landed 
in that dark vessel and been carried to its destination by 
its forever unknowable people. She never found out what' 
ship or of what nation it was, but she often regretted the 
other life that might have been hers. It might have been 
stranger than the one she drew. She had been cheated. 
She was a glutton for life and the wonderful persons one 
never meets. 

The next day the wind rose to such force and kept 
the decks so loaded with water that the captain had to 
heave to. This was humiliating and maddening. The 
voyage was long enough without pausing in midocean for 
the wind to go past. 

A little of everything the sea has to show was displayed 
on the counter for Betty’s inspection. The gale grew tired 
of its own bombast finally and the waves came down from 
their high horses and the ship sped on. 

But the pendulum of life is forever aswing from too- 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 79 

much to too-little, and back. Just enough is a mere point 
of transience. 

By the next evening the wind was so sickly that it died, 
leaving the ship as good as aground in a midnight sea as 
smooth as a mill pond. 

Morning revealed another ship becalmed at a distance. 
She hung with flabby canvas, but she had guns aboard 
and looked to be trimmed for war. Delacroix had guns, 
too, but not enough for a battle with so big an enemy. 
The range was perfect, the vessel steady as a fortress, 
and Delacroix could not retreat. There was no wind to 
run away with. 

When the other ship broke out a French flag he hesitated. 
She had a French cut, but captured ships were constantly 
kept at work by their captors. She might be a Britisher 
trying him out. 

He dared not fly an American flag, for, whether the chal¬ 
lenger were English or French, the young emblem of the 
new republic would be despised and ignored. So he ran up 
the still younger flag of the still newer French republic, 
and thanked his stars that he had named his boat after 
his French wife, Marie. 

He saw that a boat was leaving the side of the ship, its 
oars giving it the look of a great water spider. His glass 
told him that it was manned by Frenchmen. He called 
Laloi and bade him earn his passage by his ingenuity. Then 
he issued cutlasses to his sailors and to such of the pas¬ 
sengers as were willing to try to fight, but cautioned them 
to keep back until he needed them. 

Laloi leaned far out over the rail and hailed the oncoming 
crew with a cry of: 

“Vive la republique! Liberte, Egalite , Fraternitel” 

The watchword was already old-fashioned, but the accent 
was convincing and the grim look of the officer in the stern- 
sheets softened. 

The women watched with all the anxiety of their help¬ 
less sex. None of them thought of attempting self-defense. 
Better be dead or defiled than unwomanly. Betty, however, 


8o 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


found herself instinctively calculating the value of her 
charms. Her bright beauty might prove more persuasive 
than a company of swords. She might be carried off to the 
other ship for yet another destiny. She was Fate’s play¬ 
thing; but she was willing to be played with. 

The French officer swung over the side with that defiance 
of the whole world that marked the French republic and 
gave her an irresistible elan against all the other nations, 
everywhere except at sea. The mediocrity of France upon 
the water seemed to make this fellow a little over truculent 
with this helpless civilian ship. 

But Laloi embraced him, called him “brother,” and poured 
forth a furious stream of words. Betty could catch little 
beyond an impression that Laloi was asking more questions 
than he answered. Then the officer spoke with a gentleness 
not to be expected from the bloodthirsty pirate he looked. 

He spoke a long while, Laloi growing more and more 
excited. He trembled so that the passengers gave them¬ 
selves up for lost. Then suddenly Laloi shrieked, fainted. 

Delacroix ordered a sailor to dip a pail into the sea and 
throw the water in his face, but Betty ran like another 
Pocahontas and protected his head with her own. 

She took command of the ship long enough to have Laloi 
carried to his berth. While Delacroix talked with the 
visitor Betty stayed with Laloi till he came back to life. 
He stared at her vaguely, then seized her hand and fell to 
sobbing like a girl. 

Betty had not known one of these easy-weeping heroes 
before, and she was a little contemptuous of Laloi until he 
grew coherent and explained in broken French and English. 
The gist of his story was: 

“My poor sister!—my poor old grandfather!—they are 
dead!—killed—murdered by that Robespierre, who pre¬ 
tended to bring God back to France after the others drove 
Him out. 

“The officer up there asked my name, and when I gave 
it he told me that he had heard it before. He asked if I 
were related to old Victor-Paul Laloi and his granddaughter, 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 81 

Violette. I cried, ‘They are my grandfather—my sister!’ 
He said ‘They were! they are not!’ 

“You see, when I left France my father was dead; my 
grandfather lived, but very old—deaf—poor. Eighty years 
old he was when I left, and his mind was all but gone. There 
was a young man we knew, the Marquis de Chabrillan, an 
aristocrat before the Republic; but good, a patriot. He could 
not help being born a marquis, but he forswore his title. My 
sister loved him. 

“After I left France that devil Robespierre had him killed. 
Then somebody found a box of de Chabrillan’s papers at 
my grandfather’s home. They arrested him and my sister 
for traitors. 

“So they are brought before the Tribunal. The old man 
is so old, so innocent, so deaf, he does not know he is in 
court. He sleeps while they denounce him. And my sister 
makes no defense. That is not permitted. Fouquier-Tin- 
ville does not allow witnesses to be called. The jury votes 
‘guilty’ before it hears the names of the accused. My 
sister tries only to keep my grandfather from waking and 
being afraid. 

“When they are dragged away, my sister does not cry out, 
for fear she should wake the poor old man. They are placed 
in the death cart at once for the horrible ride to the guillotine. 
All the way my grandfather sleeps, his white head on the 
shoulder of my sister. She does not even complain. She 
does not ask, ‘Why do you kill me? I am young! I have 
not lived! I have not known love or life !’ She says only to 
the crowds that stare, ‘Hush! Hush! Do not wake my poor 
grandfather!’ She puts her fingers to her lips and keeps 
saying, ‘Hush! Hush! Please!’ to the crowds along the 
street. They are amazed. They are silenced. They shake 
their heads. There are tears in their cruel eyes. Even the 
insuitresses are quiet. Another daughter of Jephthah dies. 

“And so the tumbril goes through the streets and my 
grandfather sleeps as if he were a baby, as if his grand¬ 
daughter were his mother. That officer up there was in 
Paris that very day. He saw them pass, and he told me 


82 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


of it. He followed and saw them bound fast to the board 
before the guillotine. He watched the see-saw dip to the 
knife. He heard the drums roll—twice! 

“He saw—oh, name of the name of God! my sister’s 
beautiful head, my grandfather’s venerable head! Can you 
see them, mademoiselle? Shall I ever see anything else? 

“O, Robespierre! O, Fouquier-Tinville! I shall find 
you, and I will kill you! Slowly! God will give me that 
solace. He has left me nothing else in this world but my 
sacred revenge. He will not deny me that!” 

Betty had heard much gossip of the Terror, both distorted 
and veiled by distance. But she had known of it only as 
of a far-off ancient tragedy. Death was an almost incon¬ 
ceivable thing that had never touched her close. Now she 
could feel herself in the place of Violette Laloi. She felt 
herself fastened to a plank and swung forward under a 
knife that dropped with an intolerable slish. 

She could see the plank fly back with her headless body 
spouting blood, like a bottle whose neck has been cracked. 
She could feel her own head thump in the basket and roll, 
a mere cabbage, its blond hair mingling with the white hair 
of the old man Laloi, their faces lolling together, their lips 
perhaps meeting, then parting as another cabbage plopped 
upon them from above. 

Before this nightmare, she grew more afraid of France 
than of any fear she had ever known. Her long, soft hand 
ran to her long, soft throat and made sure of its integrity. 
Suddenly a whole throat became a miracle to be grateful for. 
It was very pleasant not to have one’s throat cut. 

She could give Laloi no help in such an anguish except 
the help of her warm palms and her soft bosom and her 
fellowship in sorrow. She let the desperate child cry until 
he was so exhausted that he fell into a kind of sleep in her 
arm, with his head on her shoulder as his grandfather had 
slept against his sister’s shoulder. 

And there Delacroix found them when the officer had 
gone. He glared at Betty in rage. 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 83 

But, like Violette Laloi, she put her finger to her lips and 
whispered, “Hush!” 

Delacroix motioned her roughly to come away, and she 
lowered the head of Laloi to a pillow. He slept on and 
she tiptoed out. 

The hot jealousy of Delacroix changed to a surprised 
respect as she made him understand that she had been only 
a sister of mercy to a stricken wretch. When she explained 
that Laloi was determined to kill somebody named Robins- 
prayer or something and another man named Something— 
Danville, Delacroix smiled. 

“He wants to kill Robespierre, eh? He’s been dead for 
months. Last July it was. I suppose the news never reached 
Laloi in San Domingo. Hadn’t you heard?” 

“I don’t know those French names,” Betty said. “I hear 
always of French people being killed, but I don’t know one 
from the other.” 

“Well, the hyenas turned on themselves at last. Nobody 
knows whether Robespierre tried to kill himself and missed, 
or was shot by a soldier. Anyway, they found him with 
his jaw broken and his teeth shot loose. He spit out his 
teeth and tried to talk, but couldn’t and they wouldn’t let 
him write. No one will ever know what silenced that great 
gab of his. They took him to the ax on a stretcher; and 
no doubt Fouquier-Tinville followed him soon after.” 

He was surprised when Betty sighed. 

“Poor Monsieur Laloi!” 

“Poor Laloi?” 

“All he has to live for now is the hope of killing those 
two men, and somebody reached them first. It’s too bad. 
Don’t tell him or he’ll die.” 

Delacroix laughed savagely and gave her a cuff on the 
shoulder. Then his hand slid round her smooth back to the 
opposite shoulder and he squeezed her till she thought her 
collar bone would crumple. But that is a kind of pain 
women easily endure. 

Betty was eager to question the officer from the French 
ship concerning the state of France, but Laloi had con- 


84 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

vinced him of the loyalty of Delacroix and he had con¬ 
sented to let him sail on to France with his cargo of grain. 
The rowboat was already being hauled up on the davits of 
its mother ship when Betty reached the deck. And a breeze 
was changing the sea from slate to satin. A wind came 
trundling great rollers before it, and the two ships went 
their separate ways behind their tumultuous horizons. 


CHAPTER XIII 


B ETTY protected Laloi from the truth and encouraged 
him to take sustenance from his revenge. It was grew- 
some, listening to the gentle spirit brooding aloud upon the 
hideous deaths he would make those dead men die, who 
had destroyed his family with such obscene haste. 

Betty wondered if Robespierre and Fouquier-Tinville 
were not now in hell, wallowing in vats of fire and shrieking 
to Laloi’s gentle sister to bend down from heaven and wet 
so much as her finger tip and lay it on their brows. 

Laloi never ceased to describe how he should enter Paris 
and force his way to the citadel of the tyrants, and drag 
them from the very tribune of the Convention, executing 
them there with his hands, though the rest of the pack tore 
him to pieces. 

This drama kept him busy through the storms and the 
pleasant gales that sped the ship. He grew strong against 
his day, hardened his muscles, and finally replaced a sailor 
who fell from a yard into the sea. 

He told Betty, “God sends us good winds so that I may 
not wait too long for my holy office/’ 

And indeed the voyage was not overlong. It took only 
forty days from New York to Le Havre. They escaped 
the prowling privateers and slipped through the English 
frigates of war that patrolled the coast. They came in while 
Betty slept, and when she woke it was to see before her 
solid hills with houses on them. It was comfortably confus¬ 
ing to gaze at hills that were not liquid, elastic, and restless. 
The river looked a quaint, thin thing, trickling into the 
harbor. 

The tide was high and they sailed right up into the brown 
stone basins among the black slate houses. When Betty went 

85 


86 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

ashore the land swam under her feet, as if she were still at 
sea. 

She was fascinated by everything around her, from the 
rattling wooden shoes of the people and the tall peaked 
muslin caps with the long lappets on the women’s pomaded 
heads, to the quaintly worded legends on the signs that swung 
in the edged winter wind. Some of the citizens still wore 
red cotton liberty caps, though they were out of style and 
dangerous in Paris since the Terror’s end. 

Everybody seemed hungry and cold, yet there was a gayety 
in the general misery; and Betty breathed, in the very air, 
that vivacity which is France. 

She was so much absorbed in staring about and listen¬ 
ing to the peculiar language of the natives that she left to 
Delacroix all the necessary lies required to pass her through 
the customs. 

Suddenly Delacroix seized her with one hand and Laloi 
with the other and, dragging them together, gasped to Betty: 

“You are the wife of Laloi for a while. For there’s 
Marie, my wife!” 

Leaving the two of them stupefied, he ra.i forward with 
all the meekness of a sailing man ashore to greet a great 
female with a mustache and a tufted mole or two. 

She was one of the new rulers of France, as different 
as possible from the mellow beauties who had toyed with the 
royal scepters under the old regime. Madame Marie Dela¬ 
croix had been an early member of the women’s clubs that 
terrorized the terrorizing men. She had marched with the 
soldiers and stuffed her hair into a liberty cap. She had 
helped to strip the monks and force them into the second¬ 
hand civilian clothes snatched from the hangers in the 
Halles. She had invaded the dove cotes of the nuns and 
howled at them that babies would look better at their breasts 
than rosaries. 

She had yelled with the other harpies for the lives of 
the princesses who had been dragged before the Tribunal, 
but she had not been one of those who turned against 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 87 

Fouquier-Tinville when he permitted Marie Antoinette to 
be asked that infamous question about her little son. 

And now Madame Delacroix had come to Le Havre to 
meet her husband and learn if his heart were in the right 
place. She would cheerfully denounce him if it were not. 
She brought the Terror home to him and he quailed so per¬ 
fectly before her that Betty felt herself freed of either 
obligation to him or hope of him. 

Laloi was too solemn to laugh. He hastened with the 
snickering Betty to secure a place in the first coach for 
Paris. They called a coach a “diligence” over here. Even 
the horses were foreigners, five shaggy little nags that waited 
trembling in anticipation of the heavy load and the heavy 
blows they must bear. In front were three abreast; behind 
them a pair, and one of these bestridden by a postilion in 
huge jack-boots, a tight jacket, and a greasy red liberty cap. 

Laloi tried to find Betty a seat in the inside of the 
monstrous wagon, for here there were six chairs and warm 
leather walls, and great pouches in which the passengers 
might carry their snuff, their nightcaps, handkerchiefs, and 
anything else—they had carried bread there in the good old 
times when there was bread in France. A net hung from 
the roof and was convenient for swords, hats, parcels. 

But the interior of the diligence was packed, and the 
hooded cabriolet in front already held four of the three it 
was supposed to hold. There were four passengers already 
crammed into the rotonde at the back. So Betty and Laloi 
must climb to the impiriale on the roof. They would have 
what view there was, and all the icy air. 

As the conducteur was pointing them to their eyrie, Betty 
felt her hand seized and a bundle of papers thrust into her 
palm. Instinctively she accepted the gift first, then turned 
to see who made it. 

Delacroix stood close to her, pretending to be looking 
for some one else. Without glancing in Betty’s direction, 
he mumbled: 

“I forgot to give you any money. If Marie, my wife, 
sees us together, she’ll murder both of us. If I don’t find 


88 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


you in Paris, come back here in thirty days and I’ll take 
you to America on my ship. Good-by.” 

Then he advanced frankly to Laloi and made a hasty 
speech to him. As he talked, Madame Delacroix hove in 
sight, looking as fierce as the privateer they had encountered 
in the calm. 

Delacroix presented Laloi to her with nervous enthusiasm 
and ignored Betty completely. She stood gripping the 
money and smiling contemptuously at the back of this 
Goliath who was afraid of his wife. 

Betty smiled at the wealth in her palm, but she would 
soon learn that its bulk was greater than its value, for it 
was made up of the assignats which the revolutionists were 
printing in vast quantities, playing the ancient game of 
keeping money up and prices down by law. And, as usual, 
in spite of all that the jail and the guillotine could do for 
political economy, the money fell and the prices rose. 

Laloi helped Betty to mount to the roof, whence she gazed 
down in lofty scorn at the big Delacroix heeling his truculent 
wife. 

When he felt brave enough to turn and wave her a 
surreptitious farewell, she was so weary of him that she 
let Laloi answer it for her. 

The postilion shattered the air with his whip, the horses 
plunged, the diligence lurched like a grounded schooner 
sliding off a rock. They were on their way to Paris. 

Down the stone-paved streets the horses charged, scat¬ 
tering the beggars, the wounded soldiers, the shivering 
citizens. Betty was cold, but her lips laughed, though her 
teeth rattled. 

She was riding again, and riding high! She imagined 
this to be her own private coach. She was young and free 
and on the noble road to Rouen. 

She looked haughtily down at everything except a regiment 
of soldiers plodding through the snow. Most of them were 
barefoot, and there was blood along their path, as there 
had been at Valley Forge, where her stepfather had frozen 
his bleeding feet as a sentinel. 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


89 

The soldiers’ legs had hardly more covering than their 
ankles, for most of them were draped from the middle in 
straw, bound about them with bits of rope. It looked as 
if all the scarecrows in the world had been blown together. 
But a gale of fury carried them along and they were scare¬ 
crows indeed to the hostile armies they overthrew on every 
side. 

After a moment of pity for the poor winter-wrung heroes, 
Betty’s thoughts went back to her own affairs. She did 
not hear what Laloi was saying to her or to the passenger 
at his other elbow, until one fatal name caught her attention. 
Laloi was asking: 

“But Robespierre—tell me of Robespierre.” 

The stranger laughed. “That was the grand day when I 
saw him and his brother and the others rolling about in 
the tumbril on the way to- the national razor! Their 
bandages were bloody and their clothes filthy. They 
did not go like the dainty emigres with their chins held high. 
They rolled about like slaughtered swine.” 

Laloi stared across the bleak fields and groaned again 
and again. 

“Robespierre escaped me!” 

Then a little bitter smile tormented his pale mouth. “But 
he did not sleep on the way.” 

Suddenly he woke from his dark reverie to demand: 

“And Fouquier-Tinville? He is gone, too?” 

“No, not yet; the last I heard of him he was still in prison, 
waiting trial.” 

“Then I have something to go to Paris for.” And Laloi’s 
head nodded hopefully. 

Betty’s mind recurred to its own musings. 

She was thinking of Madame Delacroix, the burly, the 
hairy, the brutal; thinking of her with envy. The exquisite, 
the young, adorable Betty envied the old grenadier; not, 
alas! because she longed for the holy sanction of the name 
of “wife,” but because she wanted the mystic power it 
seemed to give a woman over a man. 

She had seen Delacroix, who was afraid of no other 


9 o THE GOLDEN LADDER 

human being and of none of the elements, cringe at the 
very sight of a wife. She resolved to be one, just for the 
dominion of the word. 

She had never heard of the Wife of Bath who said: 

“Deceite, weeping, spinning God hath given 
To women kindly while that they may liven.” 

Betty did not care for spinning and she was poor at weep¬ 
ing. But the remaining method of gaining a livelihood was 
to her liking. 

The next step was to find a victim worth her while. He 
ought to be a Frenchman. France was the woman’s paradise. 


CHAPTER XIV 


HE long voyage in the crow’s nest of the diligence was 



1 a chain of wonders to Betty. Her heart beat so fast 
that it drove the winter chill from her ruddy cheeks. 

The first marvel was the solidity of the ancient roads. 
The very barns and cowsheds were venerable. The little 
stony towns that walled the street close in multiplied the 
music of the horses’ shoes; the humblest, plainest, most 
frozen things in France were a delight to her gleaming eyes. 

The lofty cathedral that overawed Rouen, the winding 
pathway of the Seine, and finally the walls of Paris and 
behind them the home of all splendor and all terror—here 
she was, come all alone in the greedy eagerness of her 
nineteen years to conquer France. 

Miss Capet had come back to her ancestral domain, be¬ 
hind five galloping chargers. She soon found that the name 
Capet was a good one to forget, but she did not lose the 
zest of her crusade. Paris did not know when she came, 
did not know when she went. She made no impress on its 
agonies. But she did not mind that. Whether it were aware 
of her or not, the town was hers. It was her playground 
of sensations, and it was her teacher of many things. In 
a sense she made it work for her, though it knew her 
not. 

Betty was never a writer. She kept no diaries and would 
have been content to leave her doings unrecorded. They 
were but the humming bird’s stabs for nectar as it stands 
in air before the richest flowers, then is instantly elsewhere,, 
silent, exquisite, enraptured, all but unobserved. 

There was nothing that Betty did in France to get her 
name in the papers or in the minutest chronicles. But then 
there is not much chronicle of the months she spent there. 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


92 

For she arrived when the nation hung in the doldrums be¬ 
tween the collapse of the Terror and the rise of the Di¬ 
rectory culminating in the sudden explosion of Napoleon. 

Even the lengthiest historians skim across this period in 
a paragraph or two. Fouquier-Tinville’s magnificent record 
of a thousand heads chopped ofiF in a month fell to a dull 
total of forty-six in four months. 

Napoleon had not yet come up to Paris, and was indeed 
so obscure that old General Junot wrote to his son: “Who 
is this Bonaparte? Where has he served? Nobody ever 
heard of him !” 

His family, who would soon be all kings and queens and 
princesses, were now living in such misery that they shared 
a mattress in common and were glad of a pot to boil vege¬ 
tables in when they had the vegetables to boil. If Betty 
had been invited to dine with the Bonapartes and had joined 
them as they sat round that pot, dipping into it from all 
sides, she would have felt that she had slipped back into 
her old Providence poverty. 

The fall of Robespierre, with whom he was entangled, 
threw Napoleon into jail and he would have lost his little 
head if the guillotine had not forgotten its monotonous 
clop-clop. It was not hard for young Junot to get him 
released, but when Napoleon joined the expedition to rescue 
his native Corsica from the British, the project was a dismal 
failure. 

Napoleon had never heard of Josephine de Beauhamais, 
nor she of him. He had not even fallen in love with the 
soap boiler’s daughter, nor tried to marry the old theatrical 
manager, Mademoiselle Montansier. 

Betty, of course, did not hear of him till long after. But 
she heard of Josephine, who was one of the wild group of 
gamblers at the home of Barras, the real ruler of Paris 
for the nonce. Josephine, whose real name was Joseph, was 
looking for a husband, never dreaming that she would find 
one in the little runt from Corsica, who was fully five years 
younger and five inches shorter, and no end poorer than she. 

But Josephine was seeking for a mate in the ancient modes 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


93 


of allurement that had gone out of style in France for a few 
years and then come back to stay. She was going about 
in transparent draperies with emerald rings on toes Grecianly 
bare. 

At the outset of the Revolution the women of France 
had grown suddenly deadly serious. They cast aside for 
a time the immemorial weapons they had used with unequal¬ 
led skill—the tyranny of withheld caresses; the brutality of 
frailty; the resistless drip-drip-drip of tears; the now-you- 
see-me-and-now-you-don’t of fashion; the whole box of 
weak, saintly, swooning, lascivious tricks. 

For four years the women were male. They fought with 
the troops, invaded the assemblies, talked politics, held 
salons, sat in assemblies, demanded equality in divorce, in 
property, in voting power. They formed clubs with and 
without men, “societes des deux sexes,” “patriotes de V un 
et de Vautre sexe, de tout age et de tout etat”; clubs for 
old women only, for girls, for children, for servants, for 
ladies, for divorced women, for the “friends of truth.” 

Women were “membresses” of the men’s clubs and orators 
everywhere. The fierce Theroigne de Mericourt harangued 
the Jacobins, and once when she was insulted jumped across 
the barrier and had to be thrown out with force. The men 
began to fear that their wives would get out of hand with 
their demands for equal suffrage. 

The cleverer, quieter women began to protest, to petition 
for the closing of the noisier circles, since the sly saints 
saw that they would soon have to work for their livings 
instead of posing for them. Suddenly all of the women’s 
clubs were suppressed by Robespierre. Yet a little while 
and he was suppressed; and then all the men’s clubs were 
closed, too. But the men’s clubs reopened, while the women 
gave up the struggle and left it for other nations to secure 
the equality and the suffrage they dreamed of briefly and 
forgot. 

The fiercest of the priestesses of woman’s freedom was 
Olympe de Gouges, who so aroused the hate of Robespierre 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


94 

that he had her noble head chopped off. She died womanly; 
her last request was for a mirror. 

And that seemed to remind the whole womanhood of 
France suddenly to ask for a mirror. Once more the look¬ 
ing-glass became the feminine well of truth, wisdom, power. 

If Betty had arrived a few months earlier and gone home 
a few months sooner, she might have been the first of the 
American martyrs in the cause of woman’s rights. 

But now she saw about her the ancient devices of her 
sex in full sway. 

Once more the femaledom of France was absorbed in the 
quaint and ancient game of setting traps for men by the 
disclosure of portions of their skins, by curious arrange¬ 
ments of their hair, their limbs, their draperies. They 
found once more success of a sort in dragging men down 
and pretending that the men had overthrown them; in con¬ 
quest by apparent surrender. They chose to earn their money 
by playing the beggar, not in rags and malformation, but 
in jewels and perfection. When they could not blush from 
within, they laid on the crimson from without. When youth 
slipped from them, they filled their wrinkles with chalk and 
painted their mouths scarlet. 

The men, too, returned to the primeval sport. Dandies 
reappeared. Old gentlemen put adhesive tape under their 
wigs to draw their wrinkles taut. The emigres poured 
back across the borders. The ‘‘gilded youth” became the 
rage. Delicate manners of speech drove out the words of 
blood and war. The letter “r” was dismissed from the 
alphabet. The fashionable byword was “parole d’honmur;” 
only they called it “pa’ole d’honneu\” A pretty woman 
whom one might love to death was “femme cha’mante a 
fai'e mou'i’ d’amou ’Men flaunted their relationship with 
those who had been beheaded and wore their hair d la 
■victime. 

Betty’s friends and her brains were too humble to guide 
her into the salons of the de Staels and the other intellectual 
women. She would not have known what they were talk¬ 
ing about. 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


95 


But the glitter all around her captured her fancy and she 
imitated the shimmer and the posture and the allure as 
best she could. Little money was left her from Delacroix’s 
gift after she paid for her lodgings in the third story of an 
old house on the rue de l’Arbre sec; so she had to go to 
work. 

France was almost as strange to Laloi as it was to 
Betty. He had left it when King Louis the Locksmith 
was hardly so much the prisoner as the pet of the mob. 
He came back to find that the king, the queen, princes, 
princesses, priests, and all the nobility had lost their heads 
or saved them by flight. The early patriots had been 
slaughtered by the later patriots and tens of thousands 
crowded the dungeons, though the Bastille, when it fell, 
held only seven prisoners—the unspeakable de Sade, four 
forgers, and two maniacs. 

In the place of the old aristocracy was a new, made up 
of adventurers, murderers, and speculators. Barras ruled 
France and Tallien’s wife was his mistress. This Spanish 
beauty had spent an anxious time in jail and Robespierre 
wanted her head. But Tallien loved her so that he dared 
to stand up, dagger in hand, and denounce Robespierre. 
To everybody’s amazement, it was Robespierre that was 
ruiited. Tallien married the goddess he had loved so 
wildly. But matrimony somehow ended the romance. Per¬ 
haps he felt that he had done enough for her. Perhaps 
his love chilled because, after all, he was not democratic 
enough to enjoy sharing all his wife’s beauty with the 
public. 

She paraded the streets in dresses of gauze over panta¬ 
loons of flesh color. She spent twelve thousand livres or 
twenty-four hundred dollars for one almost invisible robe, 
though the poor froze and thousands of ragged women 
languished in line for hours, waiting for the half portions 
of bread, and thousands starved to death. 

Meanwhile the gambling at the palace of Barras was 
wilder than at the tables where Marie Antoinette had 
unwittingly staked her head. All night Josephine and 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


96 

the others played at vingt-et-un, at faro, bouillotte, and 
a game of dice called creps. 

Poor Laloi’s days were spent in asking for old friends, 
only to find that they had been carried away from the 
guillotine in the long basket, or had fled to other countries, 
or perished in the armies. 

He could not even find his enemy. 

Fouquier-Tinville was inaccessible behind great walls. 
They had jailed him first to save him from the mob, then 
changed his jail to save him from his fellow prisoners. 
His children had disowned him; his mother left her life¬ 
long home and hid from the disgrace of his name. Only 
his wife remembered him and kept him somehow in food 
and wine and clothes. 

There was no way for Laloi to reach him even to de¬ 
nounce him, and it seemed that his trial never would be 
called. Laloi was so poor and so morose that Betty 
abandoned him and sought more profitable society. 


CHAPTER XV 


I T was not hard to find companions. There were French 
soldiers and sailors and numberless officers on leave and 
eager to find beauty for rent. There were beardless colonels 
and major-generals of twenty-four or twenty-five. Some 
of these had risen from the dregs in the complete overturn 
of society. There were rich swaggerers of high rank and 
wealth who had not had time to learn to spell, but had 
money to squander. 

But Betty preferred her fellow countrymen. She could 
understand their language and they, too, had money. Paris 
was full of them, and the French, weary of hatred, forgot 
that the United States had recently declared war and had 
treated Citizen Genet as an enemy. Americans had free 
passage through the streets now and the American flag 
was draped with the French colors above the chair of the 
president of the Convention. 

The American minister would have been Aaron Burr if 
Washington had not disliked and distrusted him so intensely 
that he refused to appoint him in the face of three delega¬ 
tions from Congress. Once more Burr was thwarted in 
a worthy ambition, denied an honorable avenue for his 
genius—and deflected for a long while from his acquaint¬ 
ance with Betty. Mr. James Monroe was sent over in his 
stead. 

Betty fell in with two young gentlemen from New York 
who kept an English chariot left behind by a fugitive. It 
was one of the few private vehicles in Paris, and Betty 
reveled in the glory of it. She paid her fare by her 
pretty complaisances and her childlike delight in the sights 
they went about to see. They lived at the Maison de la 

97 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


98 

Grande Batelliere and had plenty of leisure, since they were 
waiting to collect money for cargoes bought by the govern¬ 
ment. 

They whiled away dull hours with the gambling games 
in vogue at the home of Barras. Betty could not gain ad¬ 
mission there, but she learned to gamble. The young men 
were her bankers, and paid their losses in livres while she 
paid hers in kisses. And since her lips were apt at that 
coinage and she grew miserly as she grew rich, she began to 
find herself a woman of independent means. But she did not 
abate her industry. 

She laid out heavy sums for her wardrobe and cast aside 
her New York finery as flummery out of date. She went 
abroad in transparencies that would have got her whipped 
in Providence. She bought jewels cannily, and costly san¬ 
dals and cothurnuses. But then beauty was her business and 
fine raiment her stock in trade. 

She studied the affectations of the Citoyenne Tallien 
and the Veuve Beauharnais and the Grecian elegance of 
Recamier, and watched her speech so that she could say 
“pa’ole d’honneu’ ” and “pa’ ma foi!’ ” with the best of 
them. 

The famine did not trouble Betty. She had been used to 
scanty food and she had not been brought up on bread 
like the French. The restriction of a pound a day, which 
was almost starvation here, was more than a feast to 
her. Meat and poultry were in great abundance and Betty’s 
young gentlemen were in funds. 

Eighteen theaters were open and the ballets at the Opera 
enchanted her, though the dancing and the undressing 
startled the Americans. 

The churches were open, too, and it was again permis¬ 
sible for anyone to worship as he pleased, though the effort 
to suppress Catholicism had cost the nation three hundred 
thousand lives in the Vendee alone, and priests had been 
massacred in droves. 

But Betty went to the Presbyterian church, which Robes¬ 
pierre had closed for nearly a year. She heard American 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


99 

talked there and could be as pious during a sermon as 
she could be pagan at a ball. 

The streets swarmed with soldiers. There were twenty 
thousand keeping the peace in Paris, and regiments of 
national troops were forever coming and going to and 
from the wars that foamed along the whole frontier. 

So fascinating was the eternal parade before her eyes 
of a strange people in strange moods in strange scenes, 
that Betty had almost forgotten her Captain Delacroix 
and her debt to him for all this experience. 

One afternoon when there was a savor of spring in 
the air, and her young men were engaged in besieging 
the Committee of Safety, she rode about in her chariot, 
draping herself elegantly upon the seat and looking down 
at the crowds. 

She was suddenly caught in an army of sullen women 
marching as of old against the Convention to break in the 
doors, swarm the benches, and protest against the re¬ 
duction of the bread ration to a quarter of a pound a 
day. 

In spite of all her efforts at mimicry of the manner of 
Tallien and Madame de Beauharnais, the Amazons recog¬ 
nized her as an American and let her live. Old women and 
young, fat and lean, strode by, commenting on her in slang 
she could not understand, though she had reason to guess 
that not all of it was decent. 

The tide had passed and she was about to order her 
coachman to follow, when she heard a roar and saw a 
man grasp her horse by the bit. 

Betty leaned out to see who had checked her queenly 
progress and stared into the wrathful eyes of Delacroix. 

“What are you doing in a chariot?” he stormed. “How 
do you come by it, you-” 

“Prends garde, man cher, or Marie your wife, will hear 
you!” she answered with an impudence that surprised her 
almost as much as him. He looked around with automatic 
timidity before he could check himself. 

He was infuriated by his own poltroonery even more 



IOO 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


than by her wild laughter. But she no longer feared him 
since she had learned that he also had his fear. 

“Get in and I’ll give you a ride,” she said, and he sur¬ 
prised himself again by obeying. She called to the driver 
in practiced French and told him to turn out of the crowd 
and drive along the Seine to the Pont-Neuf. 

Delacroix tried to redeem himself by bluster, but his 
prestige was lost forever. 

“You’ve gone to the bad, I see.” 

“No,” she laughed, “I’m all to the good.” 

“Where did you get the price for this turnout?” 

“Have you forgotten all that paper money you gave me? 
It pays for this carriage and for my palace at Versailles.” 

“Where’s Laloi?” 

“Where’s Marie, your wife?” 

“She has a lung fever.” 

“It couldn’t be from yelling at you, because you need 
only a look.” 

He gave her a fierce one of his own that would have 
chilled her blood a few months back. But now she was 
not at sea. He was a sailor ashore and she was a lady 
in a carriage. And there was something about being in 
a carriage that transformed this girl, made a very queen 
of her. Delacroix felt called upon to excuse himself. 

“I’ve been all this time trying to collect money due 
me for my cargo from the Comite du Salut Public. As 
soon as I get it I’ll be ready to take you back to America.” 

“Ain’t you—aren’t you —comme vous etes gentil!” 

“You haven’t told me what became of Laloi, or how 
you came to get this chariot?” 

“Oh, he’s just waiting for Fouquier-Tinville to be brought 
to trial. I see him now and then.” 

“And the chariot-” 

“Yes, isn’t it nice?” 

“Who pays for it?” 

“I won it playing cards with Citoyenne Tallien and 
the Vicomtesse de Beauharnais.” 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


IOI 


He cursed her as he had cursed his sailors, and his 
hands twitched to beat her. She laughed deliciously. 

‘'Don’t you wish you had a rope-end in your hand? 
How’d you like to tie me to a mast and flog me?” 

“I’d love it! It would do you good.” 

“When I’m on your ship you can try it. You’re in my 
schooner now, and I must ask you to jump overboard. 
I must not keep Josephine waiting,” and she called to 
the driver: “Georges, arretez-vous ! Monsieur veut 
descendre.” 

She took Delacroix by the hand and, under pretext of 
shaking it, deftly pushed him to the curb, and left him 
glaring as she sang out: “An ‘voi / mon capitaine. A 
bientot!” 

He was suffocated with wrath and, hiring a loitering 
public hack, followed her, saw her get down at her shabby 
address in the Street of the Dead Tree. She saved money 
for her public appearances by spending little on her re¬ 
treat. 

He felt better when he watched her climb the rickety 
stairs three flights to the lofty lowliness of her abode. 
He did not follow, but made a note of the route to the 
obscure place, and drove off, vowing that he would forget 
her. 

But there is no surer way of remembering than trying 
to forget. 


CHAPTER XVI 


O NE morning Betty, on her way to the bakery for 
her little loaf of daily bread, encountered Laloi. He 
was chuckling, rubbing his hands. This was so remark¬ 
able that she guessed the cause at once. 

“Fouquier-Tinville! His trial has been announced?” 
“How you find that out?” 

“You are smiling.” 

“You have right. The trial begins. Come with me so 
that I make sure of him if the lazy law lets him escape.” 
“As soon as Pve collected my bit of bread I’m with you.” 
She was a little, fatigued with the gayety of Paris and 
there would be a thrill in watching the best-hated man 
in France fighting against his own favorite medicine, the 
guillotine. 

Laloi went with her to the bakery and stood with her 
the necessary* hours in the mob of women gaunt and cold. 

They wondered at Betty’s splendor and the warmth of 
her well-fed youth, but they were too used to misery to 
resent her. 

She was touched by the bony children with the hungry 
eyes. She amazed Laloi by sighing that she longed to adopt 
them all. He had not suspected the mother in her soul. 

She was saved from the temptation by the multitude of 
little tempters and took none of them home with her. But 
when at last she received her packet of bread and had 
paid for it, she broke it in two and gave it to a gamin 
and a gamine who had had no practice in saying “Thank 
you!” 

But they attacked the bread like the cubs of a wolf, 
and the look in their wild black eyes, the voracity of 
their little teeth, were gratitude enough for Betty. 

102 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 103 

And Laloi sealed it with a kiss on the back of her 
hand and a pretty speech: 

I thank you in the name of the people. And now to see 
the people eat that execrable Fouquier!” 

Everybody was talking of Fouquier to-day. The streets 
resounded with his name. It was not whispered, as once, 
with anxiety. It was not praised aloud, as once, for the 
sake of the listeners. The fashion had changed and the 
voice of the street was all for revenge upon this Herod 
who had slain the innocents. Yet only a year ago and 
he had been hailed as the useful scavenger who wrought 
for the public health! 

Betty and Laloi made haste to the Quai de l’Horloge, 
where the Palace of Justice aligned its crazy roofs and its 
towers like thick candles topped with snuffers. 

The card of admission Laloi had secured enabled them to 
get in, but he could find no seat for Betty, which distressed 
him acutely. 

Betty strove in vain by straining on tiptoe to catch a 
glimpse of Fouquier. The crowd hid him, but she was 
thrilled to the marrow by the occasion. 

A new president was enthroned, the gentle-eyed, white- 
haired Liger de Verdigny. A new jury filled the benches 
and new prosecutors stood where Fouquier had launched 
his thunderbolts. Somewhere behind the wall of the 
spectators, in the place where the hopeless accused had 
waited briefly for the scant formalities of their assured 
doom, Fouquier and the twenty-three members of the old 
Tribunal, judges and jurors, sat and waited for the law 
to have done with them. They had taught the law not 
to delay; they had dispensed with the stupid business of 
witnesses, examinations, cross-examinations, rebuttals, and 
surrebuttals. They might well have wished that their pro¬ 
cedure had been retained, for the fate of most of them was 
sealed and delay only increased the public wrath. 

Betty listened impatiently to the droning ceremonies in 
a language she could not understand. Suddenly Fouquier’s 
voice rang out as he leaped to his feet to protest that he 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


104 

was not to blame for what he had done. Betty could see 
his pasty face when he stood up to remind the world that 
the dead Robespierre was to blame for the law of the 
22 d Prairial. Wasn’t Fouquier compelled to enforce the 
law as he received it? The rest of the accused began to 
clamor in chorus, that they had wanted to resign, but had 
not dared. 

President Liger hushed them all. But Fouquier was soon 
on his feet again, fencing for his life with his fierce voice. 
Once more he was the accuser, always the accusateur- 
general. Now that he had no prisoners to arraign, he 
denounced the tribunal, the treacherous Republic. 

He frightened Betty by his shrill invective ; though she 
caught little of it. He had the genius of wrath. Eight 
months in prison had made him lean as famine and wan 
as death. He was no shrinking culprit shivering before 
the evidence of his guilt; he was the innocent, the faith¬ 
ful patriot about to be murdered for the fidelity of his 
stewardship. 

Expecting a brief and fatal trial, he had already writ¬ 
ten to his wife, the letters of a martyr to the world’s dis¬ 
loyalty. 

That which was a virtue six months or a year ago is to-day 
an unpardonable crime. ... All these frightful cries and 
odious names: “execrable conspirator,” “tiger engorged with 
blood,” though they have no basis in fact, are the prelude of 
my doom. It is the trick of the liberticides to destroy me more 
surely. 

My conscience tells me I do not merit this. If the jurors 
were honest men, as they are not, my innocence would triumph. 
... I shall die for serving my country too zealously and for 
conforming to the orders of the government with clean hands 
and heart. 

But, my darling, what will become of you and my poor chil¬ 
dren? You will be left to the horrors of the most frightful 
poverty, which will be at least a proof that I have served my 
country with the disinterestedness of a true patriot. But what 
will become of you and of them? . . . 

If I have one ray of satisfaction it is that you believe me 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


105 

innocent. At least this trust gives me the hope that you will 
not fail to teach our children that their father perished unfor¬ 
tunate but innocent, and that he always had your confidence 
and your esteem. 

Forget the little quarrels we had; they were the fault of my 
restlessness; my heart has never ceased to cling to you. . . . 
With tears in my eyes and my heart choking, I bid you good-by 
for the last time. I kiss you. I kiss you a thousand times. 
Good-by, good-by.—Your faithful husband to the final breath. 

The people did not know that he wrote such love letters, 
or believed such belief. The people forgot that less than a 
year ago they were themselves as bloodthirsty as he and 
equally furious against the citizens he sent to the ax. 

But since he had closed his butcher shop they had suffered 
a change of heart. The prisons had opened to let out those 
whom a sudden shift of the political wind had saved from 
death, while the ex-prosecutor had gone from prison to 
prison, from the dungeon once known as “Fouquier’s Storage 
Warehouse” to the jail where he had kept the young women 
whose execution had been postponed because of their preg¬ 
nancy. 

Fouquier had regarded them with suspicion and had taken 
care that as soon as they were “delivered” they should be 
packed off to the guillotine. 

And then it was his turn to lie in the dark while new 
officials searched his home, broke the seals, and rifled all 
his possessions, in spite of his protests at the illegality of 
the procedure. 

They brought out memorials of the dead, of women, 
priests, soldiers, aristocrats, peasants—memorials that cried 
aloud like Abel’s blood from the soil; a knife and a seal 
ring tied together wfith a garter; a packet of letters fastened 
with a ribbon of hair; a portrait of a woman and a baby; a 
censer chain; a chalice; a silver Christ; snuff-boxes; hand¬ 
kerchiefs—little souvenirs left by the dead to be sent to 
their dear ones, but never delivered. 

These petty things were more damning than words of ac¬ 
cusation. They wrung the heart of the people unendurably, 


106 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

for everybody understood the love we bear for the little 
things that dead hands have touched; trinkets and knick- 
knacks the more pitiful for their unimportance. 

Fouquier stood for the embodied sins of the public. He 
must die. But he must not be lynched. He must have all 
the attention the law could give him. 

At half past three in the afternoon the court adjourned 
until the next morning. Betty and Laloi went out into the 
keen sunshine. Betty was impatient of the law’s delay; 
she had read only the first page of a serial and her curiosity 
was already on fire. 

The next morning she was awake and dressed so early 
that Laloi found her in front of her door by eight o’clock. 
They were seated in the court room before the crowd and 
were ready for the opening at nine. The procession of 
witnesses began with the jailers, who told how the prisoners 
came and went; the spies followed, who had been locked 
in with the prisoners to eavesdrop upon them and who saved 
their own skins by denouncing the suspects. The confusion 
and the confessions of these loathsome animals made the 
court and the spectators shudder at the ugly business done 
in the name of justice. 

Fouquier sat and made notes, broke in with clever ques¬ 
tions, with angry protests, his shrill high voice nagging and 
irritating. 

In whispers Laloi translated what Betty could not grasp. 
On the way home after the sessions he explained at greater 
lengths; he told her how the people of France had borne 
the tyranny, the scorn, the exactions of the nobility and 
the churchmen who paid no taxes; how the poor had paid 
all the taxes, had dropped dead of starvation in the very 
wheat fields, had perished for lack of the very flour that 
powdered the wigs of the dandies; and when at last the 
frantic victims rose and seized the government, the other 
nations of Europe gathered at the borders to force them 
back into slavery. Naturally the citizens were maddened 
with suspicion of the aristocrats who had fled and of those 
who remained among them, and of the friends of the aristo- 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


107 

crats who were feared as spies and who would denounce 
the patriots if the emigrants returned. The only safety 
had seemed to be destruction, destruction. If the French 
had been cruel, it was from fear of ancient cruelties. But 
now remorse had set in. The republic was aghast at its 
work. It threw its own guilt on its agents. 

For six days the witnesses against Fouquier followed 
one another. Then Liger asked the jury if it had made 
up its mind. The answer was, No! Only twenty-four 
witnesses had been called, and nearly four hundred re¬ 
mained. 

One day a witness submitted this letter, which he had 
been asked to deliver to Fouquier: 

Man of blood, cutthroat, abominable man, infamous cannibal, 
monster, villain, vile and foul assassin, you have destroyed my 
family, you will send to the scaffold those who will appear 
to-day before your tribunal; well, you can subject me to the 
same fate, for I tell you that I share their opinions and their 
sentiments. 

Le Comte de Fleury. 

The witness told how Fouquier read this desperate de¬ 
fiance, called it “a little love letter,” and said, “This gentle¬ 
man seems to be in a hurry. I will send for him.” Forty- 
nine suspects were already before the court. The Comte 
de Fleury was hastily brought in and sent to the guillotine 
that very afternoon with the others, as an accomplice in 
the assassination of Robespierre. 

Fouquier had pretended to blame Robespierre for his 
own misdeeds. Yet here was a man he killed for opposing 
Robespierre! 

Then an usher of the Tribunal told how a marquise who 
had been accused asked that some one be sent to her house 
for a letter that would prove her innocence. The judges 
consented and this usher was dispatched for the letter. He 
found it and, hurrying back, passed the guillotine only to 
learn that the head of the marquise was already in the 
basket. 


io8 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


The audience blenched with horror. 

Fouquier cried, “I demand the documents.” 

They were produced. They proved the innocence of the 
marquise. Fouquier protested: 

“If you attack the court’s procedure, I am not answer- 
able!” But the president answered: “Your haste was in 
itself a crime.” 

Still he protested that the laws of the day were to blame, 
and the judge replied: 

“Severe as the laws may have been, you ought not to have 
added to their cruelty. You should rather have laid your 
own head on the block.” 

The audience cried out, “Bravo!” Fouquier howled back: 
“You are making me responsible for the verdicts of the 
court.” 

That was his eternal plea. Lawyer that he was, he plead¬ 
ed the law, the law, the law. 

Now he was ferocious, now he was gentle, now he was 
desperate. “It will soon be over. We must be condemned. 
Go on, condemn us!” 

The witnesses filed past, each unloading his grisly bur¬ 
den, a tale of innumerable corpses of men butchered in 
mad haste like cattle driven to slaughter and with no 
more thought. 

Suddenly Betty’s arm was gripped by Laloi till his nails 
sank into her flesh. A witness was telling of a suspect he 
had seen called forward—the Marquis de Chabrillan. This 
was the friend of Laloi’s dead sister. The witness told 
briefly how Fouquier had demanded of de Chabrillan, “Are 
you a nobleman?” 

The Marquis had answered with a little smile: “Well, the 
title was handed down to me. I did not choose it. I gave 
it up.” Fouquier simply snapped, “Next case!” And 
that was all the trial the marquis had. His head was lopped 
that afternoon. 

Betty’s heart ran away like a frightened animal. All 
the other horrors had been vague. This came home to 
her. Laloi sat by her side and groaned. She put her 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


109 

arm about him. Yet her eyes were filled with the imagined 
marquis who smiled, who was dead. Her fancy made him 
very beautiful. No wonder Violette Laloi had loved him. 

Another witness told of a business man in the dock. 
Fouquier snarled at him, “Were you the agent of the ex- 
Princess of Marsan whose children' emigrated?” The 
wretch replied, “No. I had charge of the afifairs of a 
Madame Morsan, but she had no children.” He died the 
same day. 

An old cure was asked, “Did you visit Countess So- 
and So ?” Her name was mentioned. He said: “I have 
had to visit all sorts of people. I visited especially the 
rich because I was begging alms for the poor.” “An aris¬ 
tocratic evasion,” was all that Fouquier said. And the 
cure died the same day. 

The ex-judges and jurors were dazed by the spectacle of 
their own haste, their ignorance. They had sentenced to 
death two thousand six hundred suspects and could not 
even remember the details. 

A woman in black told of her arrest; her sixteen year old 
boy had accompanied her to prison. He had not even been 
arrested, yet he was tried and beheaded. Fouquier gave 
her the lie and searched madly through his papers to find 
disproof of such ruthless murder. The mother handed up 
to the court the slip the police gave her when they turned 
over to her her boy’s body. 

A young man of twenty-two told how his white-haired 
father had calmly answered the call of his boy’s name and 
been executed in his stead. 

A witness mentioned a deaf old man named Laloi and 
his young granddaughter. 

This name went like a saw through the heart of Betty, 
and she felt L(aloi shiver at her side. As the story went 
on of the old man’s drowsy inattention to his own doom 
and the granddaughter’s meek acceptance of hers, Laloi’s 
grief was drowned in the sobs of the court and all the 
audience. 

Laloi rose to his feet to cry imprecations upon the 


no 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 

ashen, cringing 1 Fouquier, but his knees gave way and he 
sank back, resting his head on Betty’s shoulder and drench¬ 
ing her breast with his tears. 

Fouquier’s only comment was: 

“I am a little fatigued. I have a bad cold.” 

The court rose and excused him for the day, him who 
had condemned paralytics brought before him in litters, 
and wretches so ill that they had not been able to open 
their eyes or their lips! 

Betty helped Laloi down the steps and went with him to 
his rooms. His shudders of grief turned into the shudders 
of an ague. Fever scorched him and chills froze him. 

She put him to bed, undressed him, fetched a doctor for 
him, paid' for his medicines out of her own purse, and 
nursed him for days and nights. 

When at last he was well enough to spare her for a 
while, she hastened to her lodgings. She found there 
a note from her young American friends: 

Betty Darling: We looked for you in vain. We have 
finished our business in Paris and leave for the frontier at 
once to take a ship. We were going to make you a present of 
the chariot, but could not find you; so we sold it. We were 
tempted to leave you some money, but feared that it might 
never reach you, so we shall have to spend it ourselves. We 
shall never forget your blue blond beauty. You made Paris 
more Paris for us. If ever you come to Boston, look us up. 
Blessings on your golden head! 

Harry and Quincy. 

This was irony indeed! Her Samaritan devotion to 
her friend in need had been rewarded with the loss of 
a fortune. If she had only neglected Laloi or ignored 
him she would have had a carriage of her own! Ah well; 
it all went to prove that soft heart and soft head never won 
fat purse! 


CHAPTER XVII 


W HILE Laloi’s fever carried him through screaming 
deliriums, the citizens of Paris were tortured by fan¬ 
tastically cruel pictures of the murders committed in the 
name of the Republic. It was the 1st of May before the 
last of the four hundred witnesses had told his story. The 
prison spies had been taken from the line of witnesses and 
put on the benches of the accused. 

Laloi was too weak to go to court, so Betty went alone. 
The final speeches began. While Cambon denounced 
Fouquier the ex-accusateur-general pretended to sleep. At 
eight in the evening he woke and rose to defend himself. 
He raged for two hours, and then the court adjourned 
till the next morning, when he began again and harangued 
the jury for four hours more—he who had not permitted 
the prisoners to speak at all. He kept insisting on a truth 
that had lost its meaning: 

“It is not I who ought to be brought here, but the chiefs 
whose orders I executed. I never acted except by virtue 
of the laws passed by a Convention with full power to pass 
laws.” 

His lawyer repeated the same argument. 

The theme was so harped upon that even Betty under¬ 
stood it without an interpreter. She interpreted its mean¬ 
ing for herself. It influenced her whole future attitude to¬ 
ward life. 

She had spent her youth in fear of the law and in awe 
of the judges. She had cowered before them and felt that, 
however they hampered her freedom, however cruel they 
were, they represented justice. 

But now she learned to scorn the law and to realize how 
little it has to do with justice. She had heard men demand 


112 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


that the law of the land must be revered; that justice was 
upheld only when the law was administered swiftly and 
sharply. 

Yet Fouquier, who had obeyed the law as it was given 
him by the legal makers of the law, was now, for that very 
reason, an odious fiend whom all men abhorred. The law 
itself had been changed. 

Suddenly Betty felt that all these attacks upon the law's 
delay were unjustified. The delay of the law was the 
people’s safeguard, as the disobedience of the law was 
often the highest duty of the citizen. 

Fouquier had received the benefit of leisurely justice. 
He and his codefendants were within an ace of being acquit¬ 
ted. Fifteen were actually found not guilty, but for the 
other sixteen the judges yielded to the popular hatred and 
after seventeen hours of deliberation found them guilty 
of “evil intentions!” 

Fouquier’s comment on the verdict was this: 

“I have only one word to utter: I demand that you kill 
me at once and that you show as much courage as I did.” 

A week later, on the 7th of May, Fouquier and his fellows 
rode in the tumbrils. Laloi was so weak that he could 
hardly totter, but he would not be denied this last page in 
the volume of his emotions. 

Betty supported him along streets so crowded that he 
could hardly have fallen if he had tried. She had never 
seen an execution before. 

All Paris was in a festival mood, far gayer than Provi¬ 
dence had been on the great day when Washington visited 
the town. As the three tumbrils rattled over the cobbles, 
the terrible judges and jurors in them learned for the first 
time how the ride had felt to the thousands they had sen¬ 
tenced. It was their turn to sit with hands tied behind 
them and hair cut short. All the women and men were 
insulteurs and insulteuses now, without pay. “Is your con¬ 
science still clear?” one cried. Another, “In two minutes 
you will be out of order!” Others shouted, “Give me back 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 113 


my brother, my father, my wife, my mother, my sister, my 
husband, my children.” 

One young and beautiful woman clung to the tumbril 
all the way and like a mad thing heaped maledictions on 
the assassins of her husband. 

Fouquier, clammy as a corpse and with bloodshot eyes, 
answered the famine-stricken rabble with hate for hate, 
taunting them with their hunger, i You vile dogs, go hunt 
for bread!” 

At last the carts reached the Place de Greve, where the 
scaffold stood. The windows were alive with heads. People 
had paid as high as fifty livres for a window. Hundreds 
of women stared down upon the arena and waited im¬ 
patiently while the new accusateur-general rode into the 
square in a coach, followed by a strong guard of cavalry 
which surrounded the platform. 

Then came the three tumbrils. As they rounded the 
corner, the passengers all craned their necks to see the 
guillotine where the ax waited for them in its lofty nest. 

The carts backed up; the prisoners stepped down, some 
of them almost with gayety, and all looked up at the tower¬ 


ing machine and studied it coolly. 

The first to be executed was the former Marquis Le 
R01, who had had his name changed to August-Tenth (Dix- 
Aout). He wanted to speak, but the crowd howled him 
down and the two executioners seized him. Marie Antoi¬ 
nette, the queen, when she mounted the scaffold, had trod¬ 
den on an executioner’s toe by accident and murmured, “I 
beg your pardon!” But August-Tenth cursed and fought. 

They stood him up, tipped him over, and sliced his throat 
in a flash. One lifted his gore-streaming head, the other 
flung his body into the long basket. 

The ax went up and came down when the next head 
was in place. 

Fouquier watched fifteen heads snipped. He saw one 
basket, filled with the corpses of his colleagues, hauled 
away and replaced with another. It was a supreme test 
of his mettle, but he stood it magnificently—as had thou- 


H4 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

sands of other men, as had old ladies, and young lads, and 
little girls. 

His time came. He stepped up. He called out briefly 
words that were drowned in the uproar. Then his head 
went over and thumped the copper basket as the triangle 
of bright steel shot into its socket. 

The throng demanded a last view of him, and one of 
the executioners thrust a red arm into the loathsome bas¬ 
ket, pursued that rolling, once terrible head among the 
others, seized it by the hair, plucked it forth, and hoisted 
it dripping scarlet. Fouquier looked for the last time on 
Paris. He still sneered at the ungrateful ones who had de¬ 
stroyed their savior. 

The people applauded, and then broke joyously home¬ 
ward, while the executioners lingered to wash down the 
reeking machine. The sixteen heads had been severed 
in fourteen minutes. 

Betty stood paralyzed. She was amazed at herself, more 
than at the incredible spectacle; for she realized that she 
had been less and less horrified as each head fell. 

She shook Laloi, who stood as one who had died but did 
not fall. He stared at her, then nodded, sighed a little, and 
remembered his weakness. 

She supported him home. For most of the way he kept 
silence, though all the crowds about him were talking still 
of Fouquier. The voice of a man floated across their 
shoulders, “And now that monster knows how my poor 
father felt when they cut his throat!” A woman laughed 
nervously: “Three days more of him and Fd have seen my 
own body in the basket!” Once more Betty felt that it was 
lucky to be able to keep one’s head and shoulders together. 

When she had helped Laloi to his home he paused on 
the door sill to say: 

“Paris is finish for me. I think I go to America so soon 
I can.” 

Betty left him. The word “America” smote her heart 
suddenly like a hammer beating upon a gong in the night. 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 115 

Her heart rocked and hummed. Her whole body quivered 
like a belfry. 

Her dull and stupid country suddenly grew wonderfully 
dear to her—a safe and beautiful realm of peace where hard 
words broke no bones and heads might wag without falling 
into a basket. She had no home, but she was mortally 
homesick. 

At her door she found Captain Delacroix waiting. And 
of all the things he might have said, he chose to say: 

‘‘I leave to-morrow for Le Havre. If you’ll pack your 
things in a hurry, I’ll take you back to America with me 
on my ship.” 

“America!” she gasped, “but-” 



CHAPTER XVIII 


G ETTING out of Paris was the first problem. Betty 
had not finished with Paris, but she was impatient to 
give New York a glimpse of her new self. She packed her 
trunks with zest for a campaign of revenge against the 
Americans who had ignored her; had dealt her that most 
intolerable of insults, neglect. 

Captain Delacroix was hurried, too; because, as he ex¬ 
plained, his wife was temporarily unable to prevent his 
flight or to accompany it. 

Madame Delacroix had been a trifle too terrible at a time 
when terribleness had gone out of style. She was one of 
those unwomanly women who are always far ahead of the 
fashions or far behind. Betty kept just to the fore, in that 
first froth that runs ahead of the great billow, at the top 
of its forward-falling arc. 

The wife of Captain Delacroix had complained of the 
idleness of the guillotine. She had been heard to call 
Fouquier-Tinville “le pauvr* homme!” and she was gathered 
in with the enemies of the new mercy. Her head was in no 
danger, which was not entirely good news to Delacroix, who 
would have borne it bravely if they had sent her tongue to 
the guillotine. He was secretly advised that he might be 
accused of sharing her opinions and had better escape while 
he could. This was an irritating irony, as he had never 
shared her opinions, but he was ready to go, since he had 
received at last the moneys due him for his cargo. 

He sent hi^ wife a letter of mock pathos and fled, rather 
from her than from France. 

Rlie Laloi was in funds, too, to his great surprise. Under 
the Terror his family estate had been confiscated, with the 
family heads. The repentant government, unable to restore 

116 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


ii 7 

the heads, gave back the estates. But they were too gloomy 
with memories to attract Laloi, and he offered them for 
sale. 

One of the patriots who had come up from the dregs 
and grown rich by speculation in grain offered him a hand¬ 
some price for his property and he took it at once. 

The sum was not large enough to support him even in his 
meek ambitions, so he cast about for a business to embark 
in. What trade could sustain a heart-broken backward- 
dreaming man like him ? He wandered about, reading sign¬ 
boards and conning shop windows. Everything seemed to 
require an energy and an alertness that were no longer his. 
But along the walled lane where the Seine river ambled he 
found bookstalls whose owners stared into the quiet cur¬ 
rent or gazed nowhere while the wind fluttered yellow 
pages or idling ’wanderers lifted old books and mused upon 
them. The books did all the work. They were their own 
salesmen and cried their own wares tacitly. The stock was 
brought to the shop by unfortunate wretches glad to sur¬ 
render literature for bread. Buying from them was more a 
charity than a business. 

This was the trade of trades for a quiet man. So Laloi 
resolved that he would become a bookseller in New York. 
He set about with an unusual zeal to gather up a stock and 
knew that he had chosen well from the pleasure it gave him 
to select his merchandise. He purchased mainly the books 
he wanted to read himself in the lotos leisure of a book¬ 
seller. And that is doubtless the best standard of choice 
a bookseller can adopt; for he who honestly pleases him¬ 
self is like to find that he best pleases the multitude; while 
he who truckles to an imaginary taste finds that he has only 
the snobs to deal with, himself the worst snob of all. 

Laloi kept out enough cash to pay his fare to New York. 
Betty as before, paid hers with the priceless currency of her 
charm. Her trunks went with her to Le Havre on the 
diligence, and Laloi’s books came lumbering after in slow 
wagons. They arrived just in time to be hauled aboard 
before the vessel cleared for America. 


n8 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


The voyage was the usual mixture of divine and infernal 
weathers, of waves that crooned cradle songs and shrieked 
murder. 

In just the time that Noah’s Ark spent upon the waters, 
Captain Delacroix’s ship made her voyage. And as the De¬ 
luge subsided and revealed the earth again, so the ocean 
seemed to evaporate and uncover America. 

The old lighthouse at Sandy Hook rose out of the deep, 
a tiny exclamation point on a vast page. By and by it was 
a stalk of sparrowgrass, and finally a high tower. 

The wind died down as if it would never blow again. 
Reluctantly Captain Delacroix ordered the anchor over¬ 
board. It smote the water with its flukes and the rope ran 
sawing down and down, then slackened. 

Betty went ashore with the captain to feel earth under 
her feet again. The only inhabitants of this desert head¬ 
land were the keepers of a public house; the landlord and 
his weathered spouse, two parched daughters, a slave and 
his son. 

While dinner was making ready, Betty climbed the light¬ 
house and gazed between its lamps at the world. She 
breathed deep of the lofty air and filled her lungs with 
ambition, wondering when she would return across the 
seas again and what might be waiting for her on this vast 
continent whose finger tip she stood on. Then she skipped 
down the long stair and ate with relish of landsman’s food. 

A breeze began to flicker her curls and the captain bade 
her hasten. A last toss of the wineglass to her wine-red 
mouth, and she ran with him to the strand. 

The mate on the ship had already hove short and loosened 
sail. Delacroix was bawling orders before he reached the 
side and the moment Betty’s feet touched the deck the anchor 
came out of the sea with the floundering splash of a caught 
porpoise. 

In less than a year Betty had had three names and three 
souls. She was hardly the same girl at all. 

In November of 1794 a shoddy, bewildered thing from 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 119 

Providence had drifted into New York—into New York 
already famous for its beautiful women beautifully dressed. 
Abigail Adams had found the London women dowdy in 
comparison even then. A new wardrobe always gives 
a woman a new soul, and Betty left New York another 
person quite; a greedy adventuress, afraid of everything 
and of nothing. 

And now, back up the bay she came, no longer pretty— 
beautiful now! And learned in life! sophisticated in world- 
politics, revolutions, crimes, slaughters, cosmic scandals, 
fashions! She came to provincial New York as a princess 
visits a colony. Her style and title now was Madame 
Delacroix, though the name was only assumed. She had 
not been Mademoiselle Capet really. And yet she was cer¬ 
tainly not Betsy Bowen. 

Who was she? Who wasn’t she? 

The afternoon was blown away before they reached 
New York, lurking mysteriously in a silhouette of char¬ 
red embers against a revel of twilight scarlet. From a 
British frigate swinging lazily with all sails furled came 
the dreamy roll of sunset drums as a flag was brought 
in like a lassoed bird. 

In the care of a gentle wind Delacroix brought his ves¬ 
sel straight to the wharf at the foot of Governeur’s Lane. 
Betty hopped to the dock before the ropes were fast, and 
fell on her face. The sailors had an interesting glimpse 
of silk stockings below the high-furled skirts, and then a 
burst of new French profanity that inspired their respect. 

Betty had no such presence of mind as William the 
Conqueror had shown when he embraced the soil he fell 
on and called it his. She brought up with her only a few 
splinters and a glorious blush of rage at her mishap. 

Captain Delacroix infuriated her by his loud laughter and 
she would not wait for him to have done with all his busi¬ 
ness at the Customs. She went with Laloi in a hackney 
coach to the City Hotel. 

The captain had thought it better not to return to the 
Bull’s Head with Betty as Madame Delacroix, and she did 


120 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


not think it wise to return to her Wall Street lodgings 
at King’s Little Tavern. 

The hackney coach rattled off the wharf, raising clouds 
of dust as it bounced round the corner of Water Street 
and then into Wall Street past the little inn and the City 
Hall and on to where Trinity Church reared its vast barri¬ 
cade. The swirl to the right into Broadway narrowly es¬ 
caped a few belated pigs and a cow to whose frisking tail 
hung a barefoot lad. 

Then they drew up before the biggest building in town, 
the new City Hotel. A year ago Betty would have been 
overawed by such a monstrous structure. Now she found 
it nothing to what she had seen in Paris, for all its five 
stories of height. Its famous new slate roof was the first 
in America, but slate roofs were common in France; and 
novelty was a thing to be despised—in buildings, that is, 
though not in clothes and hats. 

As Delacroix had instructed him, Laloi engaged a hand¬ 
some room for Captain and Madame Delacroix, and slaves 
carried Betty’s luggage to her quarters. She was fairly in¬ 
stalled and at home by the time the captain came in, hungry 
as a bear. 

The sight of Betty’s cozy beauty softened him and they 
had supper together in their room. She was too tired to 
venture out into Broadway that night and contented her¬ 
self with gazing down at the crowds and listening once more 
to a language that she understood without translation. 

The next morning, after the captain had gone out to see 
to the unloading of his cargo and its sale at vendue, Betty 
made herself ready to dazzle New York. And she did. 

As if fate had already made her its darling, whom should 
she encounter but Lady Stirling, once more in her same old 
chariot, talking now to a merchant who stood taking her 
commands. Betty on her previous visit to this city had 
envied Lady Stirling the stiff brocaded skirts that spilled 
over the edges of her chariot. But now Betty was slimly 
garbed in the narrowest of draperies, a faint heliotrope- 
tinted crepe that caressed her curves and hung about her 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


121 


calves and knees as if she were some Grecian nymph 
floating out of mythology and making the creaking silken 
armor of the day ridiculous before the sempiternal beauty 
of the human form. Lady Stirling, being a woman, recog¬ 
nized at once that straitness was the next destiny of women’s 
covering, and that Betty’s clothes were the prophecy of the 
future. Betty was the latest news from the home of wo¬ 
men’s news, and Lady Stirling twisted her haughty neck 
to watch her where she went like a sapling moving. 

Without knowing just who they were, Betty realized 
that great ladies were studious of her. Lady Kitty Duer, 
and “La Marchioness” de Brehan, the Ladies Langdon, the 
Mayoress, and Mrs. Chancellor Livingston and Mrs. Alex¬ 
ander Hamilton, all admired her. 

Nobody had noticed her when as Betty Bowen, alias 
Capet, she had crept along the street. Nobody failed 
to notice her as Madame Delacroix. A whisper trailed 
her like the rustle of an invisible train: 

“Who is she? Whooo isshe?”—a kind of sneeze politely 
smothered. 

There was an exhilarance about this vague triumph that 
redeemed in Betty’s soul any remorse she might have felt for 
the false name she bore. But she almost burst into a flame 
with too much bliss when she saw approaching her Lavinia 
Ballou, shabbier than ever, homelier than ever, and all lop¬ 
sided with a big pail of water she was lugging away from 
a pump to the kitchen where she evidently worked. 

Lavinia did not recognize the sumptuous Betty till she 
was almost upon her. Then she gasped so wildly that 
the pail spilled water everywhere. Betty wet her little slip¬ 
per tips and had to cross the puddles, clogging on her high 
heels and catching the flounced hems of her skirts above her 
ankles shamelessly. 

“Why, Betty Bowen, if it ain’t you there ain’t no snakes 
in Virginia!” cried Lavinia, who had picked up the rude 
language of her class. 

“Madame Delacroix, if you please,” sniffed Betty over 
the round of one almost naked shoulder. 



122 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


“Why, sister! You don’t mean to tell me you’re honestly 
married to somebody!” 

“I don’t mean to tell you anything!” said Betty. “And 
don’t call me sister, you—” the rest was French, fortunately 
for Lavinia’s modesty. But the tone was so crushing that 
she meekly took her pail back to the corner pump and 
filled it again while the very black wenches mocked her 
awkwardness. Betty marched on, cursing Lavinia under 
her breath for dampening her crepe but really aglow with 
her success in putting such a distance between her incon¬ 
venient relative and herself in less than a twelvemonth. 

A little later she must make a sidelong leap to escape a 
pail of slops flung from a stoop into the gutter that ran 
alongside the walk carrying the town sewage frankly if 
not fragrantly. 

An even more harrowing adventure waited for her at 
the next crossing, for an army of several hundred cattle 
had just been driven up Broadway by noisy herders, and 
one of them, robbed of her calf, went mad with the tor¬ 
ture of not being milked for an unendurable time. Her 
poor brain declared independence or revenge or something, 
and, breaking from the drove, she began to plunge, bellow¬ 
ing, through the scattering throng. A bus driver whirled his 
team aside in time to save his horses, though he turned his 
passengers into the street through the shattered windows. 
Lady Stirling’s chariot driver sent his horse on to the walk, 
knocking down an old applewoman and splintering a wooden 
fence. 

The cow made for Betty’s heliotrope and she ran behind 
a pump. A boy, squat on its ledge, fell into the trough 
and splashed Betty well, but she was so glad of the shelter 
from the cow that she made no outcry. 

Silently she watched the beast cleave a winding passage 
through the traffic. One poor fellow trying to frighten her 
aside leaped away too late and was gored horribly. 

As the cow stood blinded and bewildered by the heavy 
burden on her horns, a butcher ran from a shop and slashed 
her throat with a long knife. 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


123 


A crowd hid the spectacle from Betty’s swimming gaze 
and she went back to the hotel dizzily, more shaken than 
she had been by what she had seen done to Fouquier-Tin- 
ville and his fellows on the scaffold in the Place de Greve. 


CHAPTER XIX 


A LONELINESS descended upon Betty after a while, 
when she realized that in suppressing Lavinia she had 
cut herself off from the only woman in town whose name 
or face she knew. 

And she knew no men, except Captain Delacroix, who 
was away from the hotel all day, and Laloi, who was seek¬ 
ing a place in Pearl Street for his bookshop. 

But that night Delacroix brought Laloi to supper, and 
afterward the three of them went to the Indian Queen, 
far out on the Boston Road, where, under the twinkly 
lights of the gardens, Frenchmen and their vivacious women 
discoursed above their tea and coffee cups. 

Here Laloi hailed many old acquaintances driven out of 
San Domingo by the fierce, rebellious slaves. They had 
poured in in all the ships from the southerly waters and 
the town was crowded with pensions frangaises, and gar¬ 
rulous with those who talked and thought French. 

In the gardens were dusky mestizo beauties, creoles like 
Josephine de Beauharnais, with skins of snowy pallor, hair 
of jet, and eyes inky with love. 

A few old Bourbons dared to wear powdered wigs and 
knee breeches, but they carried gold-headed canes in self- 
defense against the revolutionists with their hair bobbed 
Brutus-fashion, their pantaloons with feet to them, and 
silk laces instead of silver buckles. 

The French were still disputing the town with the British 
and dividing the very soul of the nation. The cotillons were 
driving out the English dances. French double-barreled 
guns and bird-hunting were supplanting the British fishing 
rods. Soups, salads, ragouts, fricassees and ices, were re¬ 
forming the country of which the exiled ex-Bishop Talley- 

124 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


125 

rand was even then complaining, “I find here thirty-two 
religions and only one sauce.” 

Talleyrand had shocked Philadelphia by parading the 
streets with a pretty negress on his arm. New York was 
disturbed by the Frenchmen and their half-white West 
Indians, and yet more by the all-black women who flaunted 
their white dominoes and their madras turbans at the side 
of white gentlemen. 

Fair-haired Betty, just up from the dregs herself, had 
no mercy at all upon her darker-hided sisters, many of whom 
were aristocrats in their own jungles. 

But she made friends at once with the white ladies and 
gentlemen whom Laloi hailed as old friends from Saint 
Domingue. The men clustered about Laloi and Delacroix 
as if they were living gazettes from France; and many an 
old emigre, hearing that the Terror was indeed ended, wept 
to think that he might perhaps live to go home again. 

The women almost smothered Betty with compliments and 
with questions about the styles. But the men were in a tur¬ 
moil, and after their first toasts to Laloi and Delacroix they 
fell into a fierce discussion. The word “Jay” was con¬ 
stantly heard and always with wrath. 

“And who is this M’sieu’ Zheh?” Betty asked the women. 
They hardly knew except that he was some terrible traitor 
to America and France. One of them dragged a young 
man to her side and asked him to explain. 

Betty gathered from what he said that Justice Jay had 
been sent to England to negotiate a treaty over many dis¬ 
puted points. He had remained abroad long enough to sell 
his people to England. He had kissed the hand of the 
queen, and his lips should have been “blistered to the bone.” 
When he came back, Washington kept the perfidious treaty 
from the public—and with good reason, for it was an out¬ 
rageous surrender of every American right and dignity. 

A fortnight ago a copy of the treaty had reached New 
York, and the people had gone mad with rage. Once more 
Washington was the target of abuse. He shared with Jay 
the horror of the people. Washington was another Benedict 


126 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

Arnold, an English hireling. There was good reason to be¬ 
lieve that he had stolen money from the Treasury for his 
own use. The guillotine should be his fate. Guillotines 
were indeed set up and effigies of Jay had their stuffed 
heads cut off. Other straw Jays were hanged or burned 
all over the country. In New York a great mass meeting 
was called for the morrow in front of Federal Hall to de¬ 
nounce the treaty, dethrone the tyrant Washington, and send 
Jay to hell. 

Betty understood little of politics and treaties, but she 
adored Washington. She could not believe him wrong in 
anything, or treacherous, or ambitious for himself. She 
dared not challenge these violent Frenchmen who had studied 
the matter, but she pinned her faith to Washington. 

At last the assembly dispersed, the men rolled down the 
moonlit street singing “Qa ira” and “La Carmagnole.” Dela¬ 
croix set out for the hotel. Betty was sorely troubled. 
In the street before the hotel she picked up a handbill 
or two fluttering along in the midnight wind and she was 
terrified at the denunciation of Washington. It could not 
be true. 

She shuddered to think that perhaps the great gentle 
soldier might be taken prisoner as the king of France had 
been. The mob might visit Philadelphia as the French had 
gone out to Versailles, and Washington’s head might fall 
as the head of the sixteenth Louis had fallen. 

“To the guillotine!” had become a byword here as in 
France. For all she knew, the gleaming blade would soon 
be rising and falling. Great men and pitiful women might 
be rolling up in tumbrils to the scaffold and rolling away 
in long gory baskets. She told Delacroix her fears. He 
laughed at them, but she whispered: 

“Remember! I saw sixteen heads chopped off in fourteen 
minutes!” 

She fell asleep at last and went to the guillotine her¬ 
self, but woke before the keen steel struck. 

The next morning Delacroix set off early about his busi¬ 
ness. Betty was called to her window late in the forenoon 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


127 


by a racket of drums and cheers. She looked down upon a 
line of old soldiers marching. They carried a banner with 
a rudely painted face labeled “Jay.” They carried French 
and American flags, and also the British flag upside down. 
They would burn and bury it later. 

Betty ran into the street and followed the crowd. It 
was like being among the mobs of Paris again. People 
were bandying jokes, each man laughing only at his own: 
“Do they think we don’t know the difference between the 
eagle and a Jay?” “A pip to the Jay.” 

The tide set toward Wall Street and carried Betty along. 
Quiet men of earnest aspect said that the treaty must be 
the best that could be wrung from England, or Washing¬ 
ton would not be for it, nor Hamilton. But rough-clad 
fellows who carried hods or hauled ashes or peddled clams 
yelled for blood. 

In front of the City Hall the throng was thickest. On 
the stoop of a watch house stood a little man whom some¬ 
body pointed out as General Alexander Hamilton. He 
was pleading with the citizens, but they jeered him. 

When the chairman of the crowd appeared in the bal¬ 
cony of the City Hall, Hamilton went forward to the steps 
of a shop where iron birdcages were made. He appealed to 
the chairman for the privilege of speech. Another man tried 
to talk. The crowd drowned all the arguments. At last a 
group that had gone to Battery Park and burned copies of 
the treaty marched back with French flags flying and French 
sailors under escort. 

Little Hamilton went on wasting his eloquence until the 
mob silenced him with a volley of cobblestones. One of 
them caught him on the brow and drew the blood. Hamilton 
laughed. “If you use such striking arguments I must retire.” 
He wiped the streaming red from his face and withdrew to 
his own house in Wall Street. The meeting broke up a 
little later after a wild resolution to burn some more copies 
of the treaty. Down to Bowling Green the citizens ran and 
danced about the dancing flames. 

That night there was rejoicing at the Indian Queen, and 


128 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


Betty made more friends. The ladies introduced her to 
their men, and she felt more interested. 

But she was lonely all day long and she fell into her old 
habit of making acquaintances—only with more caution and 
more selection than of old. Very grand ladies accepted her 
as Madame Delacroix and chatted with her in the shops 
and at the hotel. She also somehow contrived to get her¬ 
self accosted by polite Englishmen and by Americans from 
all of the fifteen states. With some of them she would 
saunter the beautiful park at the Battery. She ventured 
next to accept a phaeton ride to Aunt Katey Mintz’s garden 
on Windmill Hill, where she drank mead and sipped sylla¬ 
bub, while her escorts quaffed mint sling or pigtail. 

Sometimes she had narrow escapes from discovery. She 
found Delacroix unexpectedly waiting for her at the hotel, 
and she had to lie fast to keep his jealousy from boiling 
over. Her stories had not only to be improvised on the 
moment, but varied as well. Like all people, only more 
so than most, she had to carry on several existences; real 
ones, imaginary ones, pretended futures and pretended pasts. 
And like all writers (especially this one) she found it hard 
to mix fiction and fact so that they made a convincing emul¬ 
sion. Both memory and invention had to be ready for emer¬ 
gencies. 

One evening when Betty came in simmering with the de¬ 
light of a flirtation, Delacroix regarded her from a chair 
as darkly as ever he had scowled at a sailor from his 
deck. 

“Well?” he growled, and did not rise. 

“I was—I was with Mademoiselle Artigue and Madame 
her mother, and with La Marquise de—de Pourras and 
some other ladies.” 

“It’s odd that you never meet any men in your wander¬ 
ings.” He said no more, but his brows were as somber as 
his tone. 

The next time she threw in one or two harmless old 
gentlemen for verisimilitude. Still he was not satisfied. 
He watched her as a boarhound would a kitten; suspicious, 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 129 

able to destroy, yet afraid to wreck so pretty and so defiant 
a creature. 

One afternoon she was very late. She had gone four 
miles out on the Boston Post Road to Cato’s Tavern with 
Simeon Leesen, a gentleman who loved horses as well as 
Betty did. Ladies were not supposed to join the brandy¬ 
drinking racing gentry in such a resort, but Betty could 
not resist the adventure. Mr. Leesen bet another horse- 
lover that “No mare could show him her tail to Harlem.” 
He proved it. But this demonstration kept Betty out till 
after nightfall. She ran up the three flights of hotel steps 
dusty and disarranged, her heart doubly quickened by fear 
and breathlessness. 

The room was dark, but she knew that Delacroix was 
there. His cigar was a live coal. 

He had not lighted a single candle. He sat in the shadow, 
enlarged, gigantically a part of the gloom. His voice was the 
growl of a crouching lion: “Where have you been? and 
who with?” 

“You see—poor Mademoiselle Artigue was ill, and she 
sent for me, and-” 

He caught her glib throat in a grip so big that, long as 
her neck was, his wide hand threw her chin far back. She 
felt herself in the clutch of the man at the guillotine. He 
tore her hat off and trod on it. He threatened to brand her 
with his cigar. Her flesh winced. She could not scream— 
or even breathe. He dragged her to the window. 

“I told you on the ship I’d throw you overboard if you 
looked at anybody else. Well, I saw you looking at one 
slick fellow that you’ll never see again.” 

He straightened his long arm and it took her head out 
into space. She gazed up at the sky with starting eyeballs. 
The early planets seemed to leap from the dusk, shivering. 
The moon swung like a silver pendulum. She twisted this 
way and that and saw the high spire of Trinity whipping 
like the mast of a storm-flung ship. 

She could not see below her, but she felt a hollow abyss 
of space waiting to let her through. She was tilting over 



THE GOLDEN LADDER 


130 

the edge of a precipice, and when she struck she would be 
pulp. The ledge of the window cut her hips; her knees 
clamped the sill, her feet kicked wildly. 

Delacroix did not toss her forth. Even then she was too 
precious a diamond to be hurled away. He dragged her in 
a little and turned her so that her knees hit the floor. He 
set her throat on the window sill; her face rolled on the 
stone ledge with Broadway glittering far below. Her hair 
poured down across her cheeks. 

He laughed. “The guillotine for you!” 

He brought the window down on the nape of her neck, 
not forcibly enough to break it, but enough to hurt her. 
He twisted her hands up behind her back and held them 
while she groaned with agony and wondered if she were 
to receive a degrading punishment. 

In France, women, and nuns among them, had been pub¬ 
licly whipped, and not on the shoulders. Betty almost died 
of confusion lest she suffer the same ineffable ignominy. 
And she did. It was no comfort to her that saintly women 
torn from the convents had had to submit to the same 
degradation before the jeering mob. She was not spanked 
for being a saint. 

Delacroix could not hear her prayers and she could not 
hear his voice, now that the window was all but closed. She 
could hear only the clamor of the street, the busses, the 
carriages, the night patrol far off and far beneath. Nobody 
looked up at her. 

At last she felt her wrists released. She waited, loath¬ 
somely pained, afraid, and ashamed. Receiving no more 
torture, she brought her hands forward awkwardly, squirm¬ 
ed and lifted the window high enough to release her throat. 
She slid and sat crumpled in a miserable heap on the floor. 

Delacroix was laughing at her. He was lighting candles 
to illuminate his victim. 

She hated him forever after that. She was glad to be 
alive, but that was all. 

She would not fight him. She dared not kill him. But 
she would deceive him until she could find a better man. 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


T 3 i 

For she must never be poor again. Better any shame than 
poverty. 

She glared at Delacroix as a fox might at a trapper. He 
was not afraid of her. But he was afraid of his wife be¬ 
cause she was his wife. Oh, to be married to somebody, 
anybody! anybody, who was not poor. Just not to have to 
pretend to be married! to have some paper that would prove 
her a wife! 

There was a knock at the door. A slave brought up a 
note conveying Mr. and Mrs. Vansinderen’s most respect¬ 
ful compliments and would Captain and Madame Delacroix 
honor their home by an informal call to partake of some 
choice Madeira just received. 

Mr. Vansinderen was an eminent merchant and his wife 
had been Miss Annetje Shipboy. They lived in a beautiful 
yellow-brick home and Mr. Vansinderen had often waited 
on Betty with a flourish when she priced the vanities he 
sold in his shop on Pearl Street. He had introduced her 
to his stately wife. 

Betty had found both of them pompously tiresome, but 
she had cultivated them because they were respectable, and 
respectability was an adventure with her. A peaceful, polite 
home was an almost unknown land. 

She had even gone one Sunday to the Dutch church 
in Garden Street where Dr. Gerardus Kuypers still preached 
in the aristocratic language of old New Amsterdam to the 
lessening number of people who understood it. Betty did 
not catch a word of the sermon, but she kept as pious a 
face as any Catholic hearing her God addressed in sonorous 
Ljatin. 

To-night the one place she could have wished to visit 
was a quiet home where a wife queened it in her holy fran¬ 
chise. 

But Delacroix thought he would humble her further by 
compelling her, so he growled: 

“We’ll go. Wash your dirty face and put on something 
decent. They think you’re genuine.” 

It amused her a little to pretend reluctance and make 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


132 

him drag her to her pleasure. She sniffled awhile and was 
maliciously meek. 

She knotted a velvet ribbon about her throat to conceal 
any fingerprints he might have left; but it was not black 
and blue until the next day. 

They walked to the Vansinderen home, which overlooked 
the moonlit paradise of the Battery almost audibly mur¬ 
murous with lovers. A liveried negro admitted the Dela¬ 
croix couple to a parlor Orientally splendid. It had a red 
Turkey carpet on the floor, and three sofas, slippery but 
elegant, with pillows as hard as the marble mantle-tree or 
the China vases filled with impossible but permanent flowers. 
The room even boasted the novelty of a forte-piano, which 
Mrs. Vansinderen could play on. It was almost as hard 
to get her to play as to stop, once started. 

Lord and Lady Stirling and the Mayor and Mayoress 
happened in and Betty was on her best behavior. She used 
all of the newest expressions. Their novelty made the gram¬ 
marians wince, but they were fashionable. She said she had 
“made up her mind” to stop in town as long as her dear 
Captain Delacroix was compelled to remain. He had “hurt 
her feelings” by suggesting that she go out to the seaside 
at Rockaway, but she knew that she should be “bored” 
away from him—“infinitely!” “Bored!” such a silly wor 4 J 
offensive, too, but fortunately of a brief vogue. 

When the Madeira was brought, and negus in golden l$p¥, 
she sipped as daintily as if she had never been Betty BoWen. 

The eldest daughter, Marietje, now fifteen, and the young 
man she was expected to marry, came in and Betty envied 
the girl her training. Miss Vansinderen went to a school 
where she was forbidden to leave off gloves even at meals, 
and where she was warned not to touch the banister when 
she walked up stairs, lest it broaden her hand. To handle a 
pair of coal tongs would be ruination. 

Two little children were permitted to appear for a few 
moments and kiss their father’s hand as well-bred children 
should. They were dressed like grown-ups; the girl of five 
wore stays under her heavy damask linen skirts that ^railed 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


133 


on the carpet, and the boy was in silk breeches and a blue- 
ribbed silk coat with silver buttons, disclosing a long, 
flowered waistcoat. He even wore a little powdered wig. 

The infants drank half-glasses of Madeira with gusto and 
were sent off to bed. But the eldest daughter Marietje, re¬ 
mained. Betty studied her pallor, her thin veil of innocence 
over a keen suspicion of the world, her mitted hands idly 
relaxed in her lap. Betty thought bitterly of her own youth, 
of the jail and the workhouse, of the yarbs she had cried 
in the streets of Providence, and the many tarry-thumbed 
sailors’ hands her own hands had had to clasp. 

She vowed that for all her bad start she would distance 
Miss Vansinderen before the goal was reached. As a mat¬ 
ter of fact soon to be disclosed, little innocent Marietje had 
been clandestinely married to another young man. She lived 
with him only a year and then her father had to get the 
legislature to grant her a divorce. It was said that her 
husband was bribed to furnish evidence and that peculiar 
pressure was brought to bear upon the state legislators. 
This was something for a sixteen-year old girl to have 
achieved, but Marietje was to go still further. She mar¬ 
ried an Englishman and he found her guilty of such mis¬ 
conduct that he was enabled to disgrace and divorce her by 
Act of Parliament. Then she went to Paris and married a 
French marquis who was a gambler and broke her heart and 
purse* But she was tired of divorces and lived out her long 
life in sweet docility. 

And that was what the future held for this demure, this 
carefully bred Miss Vansinderen. Our fates deceive us 
so, it is no wonder that we deceive one another. 

On the way back to the hotel Captain Delacroix paid 



bungled compliment: 


. “You played your part so well you ought to be at the John 
Street Theater in place of Mrs. Hallam.” 

Betty said nothing, but vowed to play him off the stage. 
“I might say,” he said, “that we’ll be sailing back to 
France in a few days, if all goes well.” 


tc 


'Yes?” 


CHAPTER XX 


B ETTY did not care to sail back to France. New York 
had taken hold of her heart, and Captain Delacroix had 
lost his hold on it since he shifted his grip to her throat. 

But she was afraid of his hands if she refused to go, yet 
afraid to flee from him, since she had no means of support 
in the style she had come to accept as her birthright. 

What excuse could she give to make him leave her in 
New York and yet leave with her funds enough for her 
maintenance ? 

The yellow fever had been terrifying the city, not so 
badly as before, not so devastatingly as it would a few 
years later. Yet there was alarm in the air. People were 
seen “with foreheads as yellow as gold dust from North 
Carolina.” Then they were no longer seen. 

It occurred to her that she might have a light attack 
and be miraculously saved by the “thieves’ vinegar” that 
was to be had at all the pharmacies. 

So she pretended a lassitude. She mentioned a dread. 
To her amazement, Delacroix was genuinely frightened, not 
for himself, but for her. An unsuspected love of her com¬ 
panionship revealed itself in his alarm. He threatened to 
give up his voyage. Which was not Betty’s desire at all. 
He called in no less a person than Doctor Anthon, an 
authority on yellow fever, who was completely perplexed 
by the symptoms Betty alleged. 

Nobody knew what caused the plague, but Doctor Anthon 
served as Betty’s unwitting ally, for he calmed the fears of 
Delacroix. Betty had to get better, but not well; just enough 
better to encourage Delacroix to sail, but not quite well 
enough to sail with him. 

When he left at last Betty rose, dressed herself in her 
i34 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 135 

best and made ready for a sally to a tea garden. She 
glanced down from the window and saw the captain crossing 
Broadway to the hotel door. She had barely time to strip 
herself and pop into bed before he was in the room again. 

He had been unable to sail without one more farewell. 
She gave him the palest of kisses and the smile of an in¬ 
valid who hovers undecided between earth and her home in 
heaven. 

She promised to get well and to be true to him, and he 
floundered out again. She kept half of her promise. 

This time she watched from her high window till she saw 
his ship sail down the bay. Then she went forth to shatter 
the other half of her promise. 

His voyage was long, but she made no complaint except 
in her letters. She had a definite sum of money to keep her 
for an indefinite time. She learned to be a miser in neces¬ 
sities in order that she might be a spendthrift of splendors. 
She guarded herself so well that she was accepted into more 
and more homes and yet ran with the most reckless. There 
were many women of her sort, aristocrats by birth and 
reared with every care, yet constantly involved in scandal, 
feeders of gossip, inspirers of sermons in which New York 
was called another Gomorrah. These women were such 
rivals of the European coteries that the most reckless gal¬ 
lants from France remembered Paris as a trifle conserva¬ 
tive compared with New York and Philadelphia. 

Delacroix wrote as if he found Paris a graveyard. He 
told of the sudden rise of a young fellow named Bonaparte 
who had whiffed a mob to pieces with admirable calm. But 
mainly he talked of Betty. His real wife was out of jail 
again, to his great regret. He said nothing of his return, 
and the canny Betty suspected that he was preparing to 
surprise her. 

She watched the bay day and night and wished that 
there were some means of warning people in advance 
of the approach of ships. 

For all her vigilance, he did surprise her; but she had 
been with the Vansinderens and could prove it. And did 


136 the golden ladder 

prove it as indignantly as if she had never been with less 
sedate society. 

To buy peace with her he gave her jewels, and she loved 
them so well that she almost forgave him her immortal 
humiliation on their account. 

Their life ran on as before, and again he sailed, again 
without her. She had always some excuse. And this went 
on for many voyages. They moved from the City Hotel to 
a house. He sincerely longed to marry her, but there was 
that transatlantic wife whom he could not divorce and who 
would not die. 

His absences were many and prolonged. Storms delayed 
him; commerce was uncertain. Once he was shipwrecked 
and picked up by a captain bound for China and unwilling 
to change his course. He was gone for a year and Betty was 
pricing mourning materials. She thought it an ideal solu¬ 
tion of her riddles to play the widow for a while. He dis¬ 
appointed her by turning up, but atoned by bringing her 
wonderful silks from Shanghai. 

In time he secured another ship, but went out on her not 
as owner, but as a roving agent for the firm of Sweeting 
& Kilton. 

He gave Betty his letter of instructions to read. As she 
skimmed its romantic pages she was calculating her probable 
sea widowhood. 

Capt. John Delacroix of brig Panther. 

Sir— Your brig being now ready for sea, our instructions 
to you are to proceed from hence, with all possible expedition 
to the Pacific Ocean, and touch at such islands as you may think 
proper for the purpose of taking seals. Kerguelen’s Land we 
think you will do well to stop at first; and from thence to St. 
Paul’s and Amsterdam, or any other islands you, with Mr. 
Peron, your chief mate, may think best. 

As the success of the voyage depends altogether on your 
unremitted exertions to procure seals, we do not doubt you will 
use them on all occasions. We put a great plenty of provisions 
on board your vessel; but we calculate upon your making use 
of fish and seal flesh occasionally for your people, and that 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 137 

your beef, pork, and bread will be used with the utmost economy. 
. . . Good treatment and tenderness to your crew will do more 
than can be effected by different conduct. . . . Should you be 
able to purchase prime sealskins at one-quarter to one-half a 
dollar, payable by drafts on us, we authorize your doing- it on 
account of those concerned in the voyage. When you have 
collected as many skins as may make it an object for you to 
go to China with them, you will proceed there, and lay out the 
amount they may net in such articles as you may think best, 
being governed in this by the capital you have to invest. . . . 
Then proceed to the islands again, or go to the Northwest 
Coast for sea otters, if a favorable cargo can be had in China. 
. . . Next season there will probably be a great glut of skins 
in China; whereas the present season . . . the sealers will not 
have arrived. ... We think, if you should purchase skins to go 
to China with, and find them sell well,—that is, if you should 
get twenty thousand to thirty thousand, and be able to sell them 
at one dollar and three-fourths to two dollars each—you would 
raise capital sufficient to load the brig with Nankins; and it 
would be best to proceed home with them. We agree to allow 
you five per cent, upon the sales over and above the commission 
you will be obliged to pay to the merchant you may employ to do 
your business. . . . Captain Delacroix is allowed five per cent, 
privilege in the ship, estimated upon what she carries under 
deck.- To Mr. Peron we allow three tons privilege. ... It 
being impossible for us to provide for contingent events, we 
finally leave you to exercise your discretion; and wishing you 
success in your operations, we are, in behalf of the owners of 
the ship 

Yours &c., 

Sweeting & Kilton. 

As Betty read, Delacroix studied her and it hurt him to 
leave her for an era so long at best. She was very beautiful, 
and he would miss her beyond telling. This voyage would 
not be like the long ferry trip between such pleasure-haunts 
as New York and Paris. This would be an everlasting 
cruise across two oceans among dismal islands with only 
stupid, crabbed sailors for companions. 

If Betty could be with him, how she would glorify the 
ship. But the owners would not consent to that. They 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


138 

saved Betty the trouble of making up an excuse. It was 
safe for her to wail and regret and even to threaten to 
stow herself away. 

He sailed in a dreary mood and took out of his sailors’ 
hides the grudge he owed the world. Later he was har¬ 
ried with jealous imaginings of how Betty passed the time. 
He grew almost maniac with the scenes his lonely frenzies 
invented. He suffered incessant nightmares with his eyes 
open. 

The dreams were different from the facts, but the facts 
would have given him hardly less torment if he could have 
known them. 

Betty forgot him almost perfectly. He had provided for 
her as liberally as he could, but she was stingy with her ex¬ 
penditures and prepared for a long, long widowhood. 

Womanlike, she invested what money she could in dia¬ 
monds as the most reliable of securities and then she 
sought friends, a possible husband. This last was pre- 
plexing. If a gentleman should love her enough to marry 
her, he would not dare propose to her, since she was sup¬ 
posed to be the wife of Delacroix. If she confessed that 
she was not the wife of Delacroix, this imaginary suitor 
would probably withdraw his suit. 

She could not declare Delacroix dead for sure, without 
definite news, for he might return and confound her. 

She was in a fearful bother, and could find no solution. 
It is rather cruel that our sins should have so many incon¬ 
veniences on this earth in view of the eternal punishment 
that is also waiting for us. It would seem that this double 
penalty ought to have put an end to sin long ago. 

While Betty waited for the incalculable date of Delacroix’s 
return, she passed her time as best she could in New York. 
She was admitted to the best homes in “Quality Row.” She 
was invited to a noble country seat when the yellow fever 
of 1798 drove half the town out of town. When she came 
back her gaieties increased. In the winter there were sleigh 
rides, the theaters, dances, dinners. In the summer she 
went to the deep groves of Hoboken, or drove in a chair 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 139 

to the waterside and hired a canoe, or went in the ferry to 
the wilds of Brooklyn village. 

There were golden afternoons spent on the banks of the 
East River when a score or two of gentlemen and ladies 
would take tea together, then go out in canoes to fish, land 
again and dine “picnic” on turtles; then drive home by 
moon in Italian chaises, a couple to a chaise. 

There were sailing parties on the Sabbath, and nearly 
every Monday’s paper told of some fatal ending to such 
a pleasure voyage. 

She traveled once to Philadelphia and once went on 
as far as the new Federal City which was to be named 
Washington and made the capital as soon as a few more 
houses were built on its freshly cut avenues of mud and dust. 

In Philadelphia she met the limping Talleyrand and the 
Comte de Noailles and Mrs. Bingham and many another 
person of high lineage. But everywhere she found wicked¬ 
ness at work. Boating on the Potomac for a glimpse of 
Mount Vernon, her escorts were hailed and invited ashore 
by naked girls swimming breast-deep. On the streets of 
Philadelphia, she was told, the Quakeress of evil trade would 
stop a man and ask him to read the address on an envelope. 
It would be her own address for his information. That 
was a trick they had not known in Providence. 

But the respectable and the wealthy had also their codes 
for mischief, their signals and their piracies. Women roved 
like privateers and preyed on domestic commerce. Betty 
found that, daring as she might be in her costumes, there 
was always some aristocrat who would outstrip her. As 
Mr. Harrison Grey Otis of Boston wrote home to his wife, 
the young ladies “did not disguise their delight nor their 

bosoms. Miss B- walked in a dress you will hardly 

believe it possible for a lady to wear at least at this season 
(January). A muslin robe and her chemise, and no other 
article of clothing upon her body. I have been regaled 
with the sight of her whole legs for five minutes together, 
and do not know to what height the fashion will be car- 



140 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

ried. Mrs. F-assures me that her chemise was fringed 

to look like a petticoat.” 

One great lady was proud of a gown so flimsy that it was 
called “the fig leaf.” 

In Philadelphia, still the capital, the audacity was greater. 

The ruler, Mrs.-, swore and told smutty stories like a 

duchess. Mr. Otis was startled by the grossness of much 
of the chatter. And yet they draped the Venus of the 
Medici in green. 

Sometimes Betty, sitting at a table with people who were, 
as the saying was, “used to company” and of elegant man¬ 
ners, would imagine herself once more in Providence listen¬ 
ing to the sailors and Mother Ballou’s girls. 

But she found nothing more difficult than to be reckless 
with security. Almost anybody could be elegantly correct; 
but to be riotous and not betray one’s origin—there was the 
rub! To be “disguised with liquor” and yet disguise the 
past, that was difficult. So Betty kept sober for safety’s 
sake. 

She aped the quality, and wore mourning for Washing¬ 
ton when the great man silenced his traducers by the awful 
revenge of death. She carried black-bordered handkerchiefs 
stamped with his portrait and his praise, and she cried real 
tears into them, for there was a sacredness about the man 
to her, and his death brought back memories of a deadly 
past which was not quite dead, in Providence. 

But she aped the quality, or the livelier portion of it, in 
her dissipations as well. There were numbers of gentle¬ 
men who flirted with her all the more desperately from their 
belief that she was truly Madame Delacroix and could not 
force them into marriage. 

She was amazed now and then when something brought 
to her attention the day of the month and the year. She 
would pause like a frightened doe to realize how long it 
had been since she had seen Captain Delacroix or heard 
from him. She had no means of guessing at the conclusion 
of his uncharted wanderings. She expected him to come 
back poor and sea-beaten and forlorn. 




THE GOLDEN LADDER 


141 

Then she would forget him again, and plunge into life, 
pausing now and again to try to ponder out the probable 
date of his return. 

She had many narrow escapes from dangers nearer than 
Captain Delacroix or the Pacific Ocean. There was one 
terrifying experience that almost frightened her into the 
straight and narrow path. 

One day as she left a Pearl Street shop she was hailed by 
a loud voice calling: 

“Betty Bowen! Betty Bowen!” 

She had not heard this name for a long, long while and 
it gave her a fright. Instantly, without looking, she remem¬ 
bered who it was that called her, for the voices of childhood 
memory remain longer unforgotten than the faces, which 
change more profoundly. 

This voice so bellowed her name that she must stop to 
hush it. The clamorer came toward her with a rolling 
gait and a roaring laughter that proclaimed him of the sea. 

He continued to yell at her even when he had her slim 
soft hand in his rope-tough palm, until she quelled him with 
a hinting softness: 

“Get out your trumpet. I’m so thick of hearing I can’t 
understand you, Mister Carpenter.” 

He lowered his voice a trifle and said: 

“Captain Carpenter, if you please, Miss Bowen.” 

“Madame Delacroix, if you please, Captain Carpenter.” 

He avowed that he would be bio wed. So she was a 
Frenchy, was she? Well, the French were good choosers; 
and where was the lucky fellow ? 

“Still on the Pacific Ocean, if I’m lucky,” Betty smiled. 

“Haw! haw! haw! and a good place for him,” and the 
captain thumbed her in the ribs. “I’m just off that sea 
myself. I’m captain of an Indiaman out of New York 
and fresh from the land of the old gawd Buddy. From 
Buddy to Betty, haw, haw, haw! Are you with me for a 
pint o’ grog?” 

Betty almost swooned. Since she could not shake him, 
she took him home with her to get him off the street, with 


I 4 2 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

his uproarious reminiscences of the good old days in Provi¬ 
dence when she was the pet of the sailormen at Mother 
Ballou’s. 

She had tried to forget those days and keep them for¬ 
gotten, but Captain Carpenter could still recall that he 
had held her on his knee and drunk good Rhode Island 
rum out of the same mug with her. He yanked her to 
his knee now to remind her and held her so fast that she 
could hardly breathe. 

He was dripping money at every pocket and was all for 
a cruise among the taverns, but she made him eat his din¬ 
ner at her table, lest he go about the town calling her past 
aloud as if he were the town crier. 

In behalf of her good name she kept him prisoner for 
days, varying her appeals to suit his moods. Then one 
night, all at once, he began to snatch at his heart, to 
grow black with suffocation. When she tried to break 
from his arms in mad fear he clutched her and smothered 
her with his weight and went on dying. His last gurgle was 
a pitiful, boyish appeal: 

“Betty, m’girl, I want—I want you should take me 
home and bury me alongside my father and m’ mother. 
Don’t you fail me! It’s the last prayer of a dying—a 
dying—God! I’m dead!” 

And he was. Betty could hardly escape from his arms 
as they froze to a last rigor. She cowered away from him 
in a palsy of utter fear, shrieking madly for her black maid 
to come to her help; but the girl was abroad on her own 
mischief and Betty must run bareheaded for a doctor. 

The nearest was a fashionable physician named Ketelkas. 
She caught him reeling up the stoop of his home and he 
almost fell into her arms as she clutched his coat tails. 
Long training carried him through the necessary duties 
with the cunning of a sleep-walker. He found that Captain 
Carpenter had died of heart disease and he did not dispute 
Betty’s explanations. 

He gave her a certificate of death and told her the name 
of a man to take care of the remains and prepare them 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 143 

for shipping. He forgot all about it before he reached 
his home again, and Betty never reminded him. 

A superstitious dread forbade her to neglect the sailor’s 
deathbed wishes, however hateful. So she went aboard a 
packet with the coffin and made the return journey in six 
days of rough weather. 

Her weariness and pallor, her solemnity and the dignity 
of her errand, commanded a certain respectfulness from the 
people on the wharf. She went at once to the home of 
Captain James Mason, whose family she had known, and 
who took care of the formalities necessary to the interment. 
The father and mother were waiting in the cemetery at 
Rehoboth, and their son was tucked in beside them for a 
long rest from his far wanderings. 

The town looked small and shabby beyond remembrance 
to the Betty who had known New York and Paris. Some 
of her old street cronies were dead; some had gone forth 
into the world; some had married; some still plied the street. 
She took a distant glance at Mother Ballou’s, but did not 
visit the odious rookery where memories clustered like bats 
and ravens all too ready to be set a-wing. 

One of her fellow craftswomen came to call and was tact¬ 
less enough to ask if Betty would take back to New York 
with her a certain stalwart infant. Betty flushed and re¬ 
called the woman’s genius for asking confusing questions. 
But she answered with a forced smile: 

“I don’t think I’m going to take him, but I may go up to 
take a look at him.” 

She decided not to run even that risk. She was afraid 
not only of the confrontation and the stirring up of gossip, 
but also of her own affections. They were easily won and 
unstable. If she saw the child and he looked pretty or 
threw out his hands to her, she would as like as not be 
fool enough to seize him and carry him off. 

Imagining the burden, the inconvenience, and the dif¬ 
ficulty of explaining him to Captain Delacroix, she post¬ 
poned the visit to another occasion. As the occasion arose, 
she found always some good excuse to defer again. 


144 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

She hurried away from Providence, feeling that she had 
done enough for the cause of righteousness in restoring 
Captain Carpenter to his family. 

When she reached New York she was sure that she 
had been solemn long enough. She thirsted for laughter 
and love, and she knew where to find them. Mr. Harmanus 
Evertsen, a man of high rank at the balls and the gardens, 
if not at the churches, seemed to be looking for the same 
things, and attached himself to Betty with such reckless 
cordiality that she could not believe in Captain Delacroix’s 
return for a year at least. 

She missed her guess by six months. Delacroix re¬ 
turned richer than he had dreamed, for he had sold his 
sealskins well and had dealt splendidly in otter-skins and 
brought back a cargo of nankins purchased at a low price 
and sure to command a high. 

No one warned Betty that the captain was as near as 
the Atlantic Ocean. It was after dark when he reached 
the home at last. 

Betty was surprised. 

The neighbors shared her surprise. So did Mr. Har¬ 
manus Evertsen. He was not at all prepared to do battle 
with a ship captain who had been beating tough sailors 
senseless nearly every day for two years. 

Mr. Evertsen was glad enough to be flung out of a win¬ 
dow and permitted to dart through an increasing crowd. 
The men blushed and the women giggled, and he got safely 
away before the watch came up. 

Captain Delacroix threw into the street such property of 
Mr. Evertsen’s as he had left behind. But when he threw 
Betty into the street, he flung nothing after her except 
curses and threats. 

It was a coldish night and Betty was suddenly as lost 
and friendless as on the day of her first visit to New 
York. 

Then she bethought her of Llie Laloi, whom she had 
neglected utterly for more brilliant companions. She had 
never even found the time to visit his bookshop. She only 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


145 


remembered the address he had given in Pearl Street. She 
floated along past darkened shop windows like an exiled 
ghost, shuddering and afraid. 

A dim light fell from his window into the street and, 
peering through, she saw the dear man devouring his 
own stock in trade, though it is the virtue of books that 
they can feed a multitude as miraculously as the loaves and 
fishes and multiply with being consumed. 

She tapped shyly on the door, and he dropped the book 
in alarm. And no wonder, for he was reading with dif¬ 
ficulty the latest English novel, called More Ghosts. 

He called through the panel; “Qui est la?” 

And Betty answered; “C’est moi!” 

He flung the door wide as his arms and gathered her in, 
murmuring, “Bettee!” 

He led her to the fireplace and threw on fresh wood. 
He asked no questions. He knew that his good friend 
Delacroix was violent and that his dear friend Betty was 
frivolous; and he blamed neither of them for qualities they 
had not selected. He was not God and was glad of it, for 
it saved him from judging. His revered grandsire and his 
adored sister had been shamefully done to death by due pro¬ 
cess of law and he felt them martyrs. He carried in his 
breast no Tribunal of the Terror to condemn other people. 

It was enough for him that Betty was chilled and lost 
and in need of tenderness. He counted it a privilege to 
squander the one wealth he had. 

He spoke of the weather. “It makes cold to-night, not?” 
How well she looked, but a little tired. She should take 
some sleep. His bed was idle. He must work all night, 
unpacking those grand chests of books just come from 
England and from France. 

To-morrow the ladies of New York would flock in to 
see them. He would be very rich soon. He read Betty 
the titles of the most popular. His pronunciations made 
her laugh. Hardly anything else could have relaxed the 
bitter pallor of her mouth. There was Female Frailty, or 
the History of Miss Wrought on. There were The Cavern 


146 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

of Woe and The Posthumous Daughter , The Devil in Love 
and Mrs. Radcliffe’s The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, 
and Rinaldo Rinaldini. 

Little girls of thirteen would read some of these aloud 
to their grandmothers and bring blushes to the old cheeks, if 
not to the more daring young. 

Laloi forced three or four of these books on Betty that 
she might read herself to sleep. He led her to the little loft 
where his bed was, and lighted candles for her, and stacked 
up books for a sleeping draught. He kissed her brotherly 
and bade her a good night, then slipped down stairs to sleep 
smiling in his chair before the dying fire. He was rich at 
last, since his roof sheltered wisdom in books and beauty in 
pain. 

Betty slipped from her light clothes and drew the blankets 
about her, then put out one long bare arm and drew to her 
bosom the topmost book. It was a story of the recent suicide 
of a girl whose brother would not let her marry her lover 
before he sailed away to Guadaloupe, and who killed herself 
to hide her coming shame. 

Betty’s heavy eyes had drowsily conned the book as far 
as the flowery lines where “the lover unloosed the virgin 
zone of his yielding fair.” She did not quite take in the 
heavily disguised thought, and the covers of the book closed 
on her fingers. The weight of the volume carried her hand 
down to the side of the couch and, escaping from the listless 
clasp, it dropped to the floor. 

But Betty did not even hear the thud of the book. She 
had already turned her sharp little chin into her soft round 
shoulder and had sighed herself to sleep. 


CHAPTER XXI 


L UCKILY for Betty, she had been wearing all her rings 
when she was ousted from the domicile and the name 
of Madame Delacroix. 

She need not starve, therefore, for a while. She could not 
have lived with Laloi even if she had been as willing to 
play the cuckoo and crowd him out of his nest as he was 
willing to surrender it. 

She went back to King’s Little Tavern, which had a 
new landlord now. When he asked her her name, she mum¬ 
bled, “Betty Bowen.” 

“Betty?—that would be Eliza. Eliza Browne, then?” 
She nodded. One name was as good as another now. 
She went out to pledge one of her rings and buy herself 
some necessary raiment. The very shop doors seemed to 
know that she was in disgrace and, worse than that, out of 
sorts with wealth. 

The shopkeepers treated her as if it were a harsh neces¬ 
sity and a generous Samaritanism to sell her anything at 
all. On the streets she found evidence that the story of her 
eviction had already spread everywhere. 

The gentlemen who lifted their hats to her did not lift 
them very high. The ladies did not see her at all. Women 
who had thrown their arms about her at the turtle feasts and 
called her “dearest” did not seem to know that she passed 
by. 

She could have told things about some of them that would 
have brought them down the steps of their homes as grace- 
lessly as she had descended hers. But she was not eager 
to drag others to her level. She wanted to get back to 
theirs. And she vowed that she would, come what might., 
One day she met Laloi hurrying along Broadway. Seeing 
i47 


I 4 8 the golden ladder 

how dismal her humor was, and being unwilling to leave her 
and unable to saunter with her, he begged her to come 
along. 

“I show you people more onhappy as you. That makes 
sometimes people happy to see somebody w’at is not so 
happy, yes?” 

Having nothing else to do, she went with him, not learn¬ 
ing that he was visiting the Debtors’ Prison till they had 
crossed the park to the little square building of stone with 
its centred belfry whence the first fire alarm usually re¬ 
sounded. 

On the roof, three stories up, prisoners were strolling to 
and fro for the air and the exercise. Others were just 
finishing the meal of half a pound of meat, the pint of 
soup, the two potatoes and the dumpling of Indian corn- 
meal that the Humane Society had been furnishing for a 
dozen years to wretches else doomed to famine. Others 
were driven back to their eternal task of picking oakum 
to calk the wounds of ships and people. 

Bedding they still had none, and in winter only such fuel 
as they could wheedle by petitions in prose and verse, peti¬ 
tions for “Firing, Meat, and Pence.” 

At times one citizen in twenty was in the debtors’ prison, 
often for a sum under twenty shillings. It was a ghastly 
irony to shackle a man so that he could never earn his own 
acquittance; but it was no more foolish or heartless than 
many another public habit. 

Over in Philadelphia, had not Robert Morris spent three 
years in the Prince Street debtors’ prison—that very Morris 
who had been the treasurer of the Revolution and had 
afterward made way for Alexander Plamilton? When the 
march against Cornwallis had been undertaken, Morris had 
issued his own notes to the total of nearly a million and 
a half dollars so that Washington’s men might be fed. Yet 
when he lost his fortune in land speculation his own bail 
surrendered him to the sheriff, though his frantic wife, 
who had been the ruler of fashion, beat the stingy friend 
in the street. 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 149 

If Robert Morris could be left to rot on a board in a cell, 
why should a French fugitive complain? 

While Betty crossed “the Fields,” as the park had been 
called until recently, Laloi explained that he came to secure 
the freedom of a man who had been good to him in San 
Domingo when his life was in danger. 

Stephen Jumel had gone from France to the island as a 
young man and had grown wealthy speedily. Then the 
slaves had risen and overwhelmed the troops and the white 
citizens. 

Glad to be alive at all, Jumel had left his warehouses to 
the marauding blacks and hidden in the canebrake. He 
had found Laloi exhausted there and dying of hunger; 
he had fetched him water at great peril from a stream, 
and had shared with him the food that a devoted slave 
brought him secretly every night. 

Jumel had refused to escape in the boat with Laloi and 
had lingered in the hope of regaining his property. Failing 
that, he had sailed to St. Helena and thence to New York, 
where he had borrowed money to set him up in business. 

His first venture crashed and he was put behind the 
bars by a hard-hearted creditor. And there he had lan¬ 
guished until Laloi had heard of him only this day, and 
was hastening to the rescue with all the free cash he pos¬ 
sessed to ransom his friend. 

Betty had been in jail, too, but not for debt. She did 
not tell Laloi of this, and yet the memory of the noisome 
dens made her gorge rise and her heart stammer in its 
course. 

The debtors’ prison was like all the others, a foul and 
stinking human sewer where cleanliness was not possible, 
where only the vermin fattened, and where every vice spread 
by contagion. 

The jailer’s prosperity lay in the fees he might exact, 
and so his courtesy was for sale. While Laloi did not look 
like a merchant prince, he evidently had money aboard and 
the jailer escorted Laloi and Betty to the chapel on the 


150 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

second floor where prayers were read but not answered 
every Thursday. 

Thither Jumel was fetched from his rathole. He made 
a spectacle of such foul misery that Betty almost dreaded 
to take his hand when Laloi presented him. 

Jumel had entered the prison a gentleman of excellent 
condition except for the vacancy in his pockets. The prison¬ 
ers had immediately performed the traditional rite of- “gar¬ 
nishing” ; they had attacked him, tossed him in a blanket, 
then stripped him stark naked and offered to sell him back 
such of his own clothes as he could buy with drink money. 
Since he could buy none of his garments, they were sold 
for what they would bring, and his decency, thus trans¬ 
muted, vanished down the gullets of his thirsty ward- 
mates. A drunken carousal ensued that reminded him of 
the orgies of the Domingan savages. It was such scenes as 
those that led many to advocate solitary confinement as the 
only cure for prison evils. Many good people felt that it was 
a great evil to permit prisoners to see or speak to anybody. 

Jumel had since collected just rags enough to make it pos¬ 
sible for him to leave his cell under the jailer’s care. And 
then he had waited helplessly for death or disintegration to 
end his predicament, for he could not get out till his debt 
was paid and he had no way of paying his debt. 

When he saw Laloi and learned what errand had brought 
him, he wept with French enthusiasm. When he told the 
amount he owed, Laloi wept again—for the sum was beyond 
his reach. 

Jumel was about to return to his grave, but the jailer 
intervened. He told Laloi that for two shillings and a 
proper security, the prisoner would be allowed to enjoy the 
“limits”; that is to say, he could dwell anywhere within a 
hundred and sixty acres of the jail. 

Once more Laloi was a prince. When it came to two 
shillings he could do the munificent thing. And Jumel, 
a genius of a merchant, laughed at the world once more. 
Give him liberty and he would soon be rich, though he 
were freed in a desert. 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


151 

The lesson of the debtors’ prison made so little cor¬ 
rection in his principles that he borrowed from Laloi all 
he had and invested in clothes first. These were ready 
to be donned, for a spendthrift had just been brought into 
the jail and was even now bald naked and going up and 
down in a blanket while the prisoners howled a chanty. 

Jumel bought the wretch’s extravagantly handsome ward¬ 
robe entire from the thirsty rioters, made the man a present 
of his own rags, and left the prison in a better suit and hat 
and boots than his creditor Laloi had ever possessed. 

After a deep breath of the air of freedom, he abandoned 
Betty and his radiant savior flat and hurried to a barber’s, 
where he spent two precious shillings more to have his 
hair cut and his jowls shaven. He even went to a place 
where baths could be had. 

That night at supper he was voluble with the business 
he had already set afoot. He took Betty to the theater and 
strolled home with her, after. 

He had dazzled her by the vivacity of his recovery from 
despair, and fascinated her by his immediate dash for 
cleanliness and elegance and generosity. For as soon as 
a tailor could build him clothes of his own he restored the 
suit he had worn away from the jail to the heir of his 
rags in the debtors’ prison. He was already rushing sky¬ 
ward like a rocket and his sparks fell on Betty’s cold heart 
and kindled it. 

Fortune is an odious snob and is always licking the boots 
of the successful. So soon as Jumel had put himself in 
a fair way to prosperity and the payment of his debts, 
what should happen but a miracle? Or rather, a thing 
that should have been accepted as a stupid blunder received 
a false glamour by its deferred timeliness. 

In his last golden hours on the island of San Domingo 
Jumel had shipped a cargo of coffee to New York—just 
before the slaves seized the island. He never heard of 
his cargo again and assumed that it was lost. He never 
thought to ask of it when he landed in New York. In the 


152 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

great city of more than sixty thousand souls he was unob¬ 
served. Then one day, by accident he met the consignees 
and learned that his coffee had been delivered safely to 
them; that they had sold it and held in trust for him a sum 
that was almost incredible. It paid his debts, paid off Laloi, 
and enabled him to set himself up as a merchant with a 
warehouse all his own. 

He celebrated his regained paradise by a dinner at the 
Tontine Coffee House, where the other merchants studied 
him gravely. Betty and Laloi were his guests and good 
wines so warmed them that when they left the restaurant 
at half past one the sunshine itself was more wine and 
the streets and buildings rippled pleasantly with a breezy 
oscillation that made every step a matter for lively con¬ 
sideration. 

Laloi bade them a dizzy adieu and hurried away to un¬ 
lock his shop. Jumel stood wondering how he could gal¬ 
lantly be rid of Betty and get back to the ledgers which 
were his books of poetry. 

As they loitered, a chariot passed, carrying Mrs. Van- 
sinderen, who looked at Betty as if she were transparent 
and only smiled when the wheels, dipping in a puddle, 
flung on Betty a pailful of muddy water, which expressed 
Mrs. Vansinderen’s opinion of her exactly. 

Jumel was grieved. He saw that Betty was crucified 
with shame. He said : 

“Ma’m’selle should have a carriage and make mud upon 
that leddy.” 

“If I only had!” Betty moaned. “God! but I’d smother 
that-” 

“W’at you geeve to somebody who buys you carriage 
and horses?” 

“I’d give my soul!” 

“I take! Your soul is good price for the most fine car¬ 
riage in New York. You go see Meester Abraham Queeck. 
He is best carriage-beelder in thees city. You tell Meester 
Queeck how I tell him beeld you most beautiful carriage 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


153 

in thees co’ntry. And tell him look out for two nice horses 
to pool those carriage. And then you breeng your soul to 
me, yes?” 


CHAPTER XXII 


HE pricing of jewels and soft fabrics, of hats and 



A slippers, had been the pleasantest of human occupa¬ 
tions to Betty. 

But there was something divine about ordering a car¬ 
riage built to the measure of her pride. She was as exul¬ 
tant as Phaethon had been when he ran ofT with (lie chariot 
of horses of the sun — until they ran ofT with him. What 
Phaethon would have felt if he had owned the chariot was 
what Betty felt when she descended upon Mr. Quick, like 
an angel stooping from the clouds. 

Mr. Quick loved his high career and practiced it in his 
carriage works in Broad Street. It thrilled him to find 
one who looked upon him as the artist he was. And he 
was artist enough to see that Betty would decorate his 
best achievement. 

Poor Betty knew nothing about carriages, yet common 
decency forbade her to expose the nakedness of her igno¬ 
rance. And Mr. Quick was so fine a soul that he pretended 
to l^e unaware of her plight and subtly informed her while 
apparently assuming her to be as profound a scholar as 
himself. 

She began by saying: “Mr. Quick, I believe." 

The great man was in shirt sleeves, but he nodded modest¬ 
ly, and she went on. 

“I am Miss Eliza Browne." 

“Yes, indeed," said Mr. Quick, who had often admired 
her as she ]>assed, admired her fine construction of willow 
and rattan, upholstered in cream. 

“My friend, Mr. Jumel - " 

“Ah, Mr. jumel — oh yes, ma’am." 



THE GOLDEN LADDER 155 

“He wants me to have a carriage, the best there is. And 
of course that means that only you could make it.” 

“And if I can make the best —as I don’t say I can’t—that 
means that only you could - ” 

“Why, IVfr. Quick!” 

“Er—ahem! — I better stick to my trade. Now what kind 
of carriage were you allowing to command —a coachee like 
Lady Stirling’s?” 

“Pooh!” 

“Just so! It is a wee trifle old-fashioned. But have you 
seen Mrs. Vansinderen’s chariot?” 

“Humph! I wouldn’t ride in her old wheelbarrow to see a 
bull baiting.” 

“No, nor me, neither. Now Justice Jay’s lady has a 
horsechaise with a leathern top and a seat over the shafts 
for the driver; and it’s swung on leathern thorough-braces 
and-” 

“Bum it with the treaty her husband brought back.” 

“Haw! haw! haw! Now there’s an idea for you! We’re 
making chairs with four wheels now for two horses. And 
a gentleman needn’t consider it effeminate to ride in ’em 
like he would in just a two-wheeled one-horse chair.” 

She shook her luminous head. He went higher: 

“How about a curricle, or, say, a calash, now—a calash 
coach. They’re importin’ ’em from England, but I make 
’em as good and better. I could fix you one so’s the top 
would fall down front and back and make an open car¬ 
riage when you Want it so.” 

This interested her. Her eyes gleamed and he felt that 
he could play with his caught fish: 

“Of course, a coach like the President’s would be none 
too grand for you—with gilt carvings and little naked cupids 
painted on the panels and four horses to drag it.” 

She shook her head, and yet a little wistfully. She was 
afraid of four horses at first and of the naked cupids in 
public. He went back to the calash, and improvised a 
poem in timber and leather. 

“For the frame I’d use only the toughest ash, growed 



156 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

in open places and seasoned for two years. And nicer 
joinery can’t be done than what I do here. For the plank¬ 
ing, the stoutest ellum; and for the panels Spanish cedar 
with ornaments in mahogany and rosewood. You can have 
the upholstery in damask or plush, with coach-lace covers. 
The thorough-braces will ride you as easy as a cradle. And 
as for wheels! It’s the wheels that tells, and your good 
wheelwright has got to be an artist. 

“I’d give you felloes of ash, oak spokes, and an ellum 
nave, and tires of the best iron, with the plates break¬ 
ing joints with the felloes as nice as can be.” 

Almost swooning with all this learning and the promise 
of wings to uphold her, Betty could hardly bear to descend 
to a question of money. But she must. 

“And how much would all that cost me—or Mr. Jumel?” 

“Well now, if it was me was making it for you, I’d say 
it was cheap for a kiss. But seeing as how it’s Mr. Jumel, 
and he’s a sharp one at bargains, I’d not dast ask more than 
two hundred pounds.” 

“Two hundred pounds!” she cried. “To ride me around 
this little town that I could walk over in an hour or two?” 

“But I can’t make a carriage in an hour or two, and 
with wages rising so fast—Do you know what I have to 
pay a day for labor? Forty cents! and the lazybones 
only work from sunrise to sunset. Some of my skilledest 
men are getting as high as twenty dollars a month. And 
the rents—three hundred pound a year this place costs me.” 

She was not interested in his financial anguishes. She 
cut him short with a bewildered query. It was crass and 
vulgar to refer to “dollars” and “cents” when the genteel 
spoke only of pounds, shillings and pence, but Betty had 
to know the facts. She stammered: 

“Two hundred pounds would amount to—how much in 
our money?” 

“Eight hundred dollars.” 

This terrified her. 

“What would Mr. Jumel say to that?” 

“He knows and he don’t care or he wouldn’t have sent 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


157 

you to me. And there’s the horses to that—and a driver, 
imported from England, most like.” 

Betty shuddered. She felt she would be bankrupting the 
nation. Then she remembered her Paris—Madame Tal- 
lien’s one dress that cost more than two thousand dollars. 
Why shouldn’t she have a carriage? Why should she walk 
and let Mrs. Vansinderen splash her skirts with gutter 
wash? 

She nodded desperately. 

“Very good. But you’d best make sure that Mr. Jumel 
will pay it before you cut a spoke.” 

This reassured Mr. Quick wonderfully, and he bowed her 
out as if she were a bishop’s lady. Then he slipped into his 
coat and hurried round to Mr. Jumel’s warehouse. He 
found the portly Gaul in shirt sleeves, helping to roll the 
casks of wine to their niches. When Jumel learned the 
price of his gift to Betty, the sum startled him. 

But when Mr. Quick told him how Miss Browne’s eyes 
had brightened at the plan of the calash, Jumel sighed and 
told him to proceed. 

And so the man who had lately hidden in the San Domin¬ 
gan cane-brake now bade make a carriage for the girl who 
not so long since was trundling a cart of yarbs through the 
damp streets of Providence. Yet how better could they 
spend their wealth ? 

While the carriage was building there were the horses 
to seek. This was ever so much more exciting. You do 
not order horses built. You take them as God made them, 
as you take a husband or a wife. And they are as apt to 
prove intractable. 

In her quest for steeds, Betty called upon the horse 
gentleman who had taken her out to Cato’s Tavern on 
that dreadful day when Delacroix almost jettisoned her 
from the high window of the City Hotel for her flirtations. 

Mr. Simeon Leesen was a large dealer in whale oils and 
candles, a rival of the great house whose head was Mr. Pre¬ 
served Fish, and the junior partner Saul Alley. Mr. Leesen 
led Betty into his counting room and heard her story. He 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


158 

consented to give her his advice, but exacted a few kisses for 
his fee. She paid him carelessly. Then he set his brows to 
work: 

“You’ll want, of course, a pair well matched, genteel but 
mischievous—like your pretty self, thoroughbred but awake. 
It’s easy to get single animals; but to twin them—that’s the 
rub. The other day I picked up as pretty a Chickasaw as 
ever trod on four pasterns. I swopped a roan for her. 
But I couldn’t match her. A man was trying to sell me 
a Narragansett racer from Rhode Island for ninety dol¬ 
lars, but the beast had jumped overboard and swum ashore 
from the sloop and strained himself. 

“You don’t want Conestogas; they’re too heavy. Cana¬ 
dians ? No. I know a black pacer, about fifteen hands high, 
close-ribbed, roundbodied. He has been brought up on ale 
and porter, so he’s got spirit. I saw him drink a glass of 
wine as pretty as an alderman. If I could match him, he 
would do you proud—if you’ve got the money. I’d make 
you a gift of a handsome pair, but the gentleman who is 
buying your carriage for you would probably challenge 
me to a duel; and I’m not yet grown used to the ball in 
my shoulder from my last argument with a gentleman 
over his best friend. But I hear that Jumel is an amiable 
old man and I’ll risk helping you in your selection if you’ll 
come with me.” 

He took Betty to the farrier who kept the black pacer. 
The man claimed that the horse was a son of Messenger, 
imported in 1792, and the best stallion ever brought to 
America. The pacer was called Baronet and his eye was 
like wet onyx. His great nostrils fluttered with a whinny 
of welcome as Betty approached, and when she stroked the 
black cascade of his mane he bunted her amiably with his 
nose, and she loved him. 

The farrier had no wine at hand; but to prove the 
animal an epicure he fetched a glass of cider and the Baronet 
gulped it down with relish. 

When Leesen explained that Miss Browne wanted also 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 159 

the duplicate of this horse, the farrier scratched his poll 
and said: 

“I know the very spit of him. He’s one of Highlander’s 
get, and they call him Barefoot. He’s what I calls a hoss, 
and if you harnessed him alongside my Baronet you’d think 
one of ’em was the shadder of t’other.” 

So Betty called on Barefoot and her love was not divided, 
but doubled. 

When she made her report to Jumel, he asked who had 
selected the horses for her. She stammered a little, and he 
flushed with jealousy when she confessed that she had gone 
horse-hunting in the notorious company of Simeon Leesen. 
But then she cried: 

“Would you have me cheated? I wanted only to make 
sure that your money would be well laid out and that I 
shouldn’t disgrace the great Mr. Jumel by riding behind 
a pair of sorry cattle!” 

Jumel was pleased by her flattery, but he was more 
touched by the evident hunger of her pride. And his 
warm heart leaped to the delights of forgiveness and gen¬ 
erosity. 

He could pare the shillings and pinch the pence with other 
merchants, but where his pity was invoked or when beauty 
was the beggar, he grew spendthrift. He told her that she 
should have the horses she wanted and the best harness 
in town and a good stable, and any coachman that she 
preferred. 

She stood one rung higher on her upward climb when 
she looked down upon the men who came soliciting the 
privilege of playing Jehu to her majesty. She selected a 
Londoner who had hitherto driven nothing less than dukes 
and countesses—to hear him tell it. A query as to how and 
why he had come to America set him to fumbling for words, 
and Betty did not press the matter. She did not believe in 
insisting too much upon a thoroughly explicable past. Sup¬ 
pose that people began to ask her why she came from Provi¬ 
dence ! 


i6o THE GOLDEN LADDER 

So she selected the ducal charioteer and learned that his 
name was Clarence : 

“Same name as the duke’s who was over ’ere during the 
war—and didn’t he learn to skate on the Collect Pond? 
Only ’is name then was Prince Willium ’Enery, which is 
my father’s name, save for the Prince, of course.” 

“Very good, Clarence. You may ’ave the post,’’ said 
Betty, losing an “h” by pure contagion, though she tried to 
speak right royally. 

The question of clothes was urgent. Clarence’s raiment 
was threadbare and slept-in. A livery would be glorious. 
So Betty sent Clarence to a tailor and told him to select his 
own wardrobe. 

Since she gave him an advance on his wages and he in¬ 
vested it in grog, when he went to the tailor he “walked 
by starlight” as the saying was. He was “as dizzy as a 
goose,” and he ordered a costume that might have passed 
without ridicule in a Lord Mayor’s procession, but was war¬ 
ranted to cause a wake of laughter in New York. 

But Betty did not care. She was none of your violets. 
She wanted to make a noise and hear the echo. 

She was possessed with devils of impatience till the day 
of her translation from a foot passenger to the carriage 
gentry. 

On a day of grandeur she walked to Mr. Quick’s and 
saw her gorgeous Clarence lead up her team of black 
pacers in silver-tipped harness. Mr. Quick and his aides 
rolled out the glistening calash with its colored wheels, and 
hitched the chargers thereto. 

Clarence mounted the pulpit in front and Betty hoisted 
her dainty foot. The omens were evil, for her foot slip¬ 
ped off the step and she barked her shin on the sharp edge. 
She made it on the second try, and sumptuously disposed 
her skirts about her. 

Her leg bled one long white silken stocking red, but she 
let it bleed and ache for her heart was aching with pride. 

She whacked her head, too, against the frame of the top, 
for she was pitifully unused to riding in her own calash. 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 161 

But she straightened her hat and nodded to Mr. Quick 
and murmured: 

“Clarence, you may drive out Broadway to the hilltop, 
then back to Mr. Jumel’s warehouse/’ 

Broadway was full of ruts and toppled cobbles and 
of muddy sloughs about the pumps. But she swam as 
statelily as if she drifted in Cleopatra’s barge. 

She gave the staring ladies no chance to snub her, for 
they were but window panes to her. She saw right through 
them—ladies, gentlemen, beggars, crossing-sweepers, all. 

Then peril threatened. 

She heard a yell as of raiding Indians, and down the 
street came whooping a gang of lads dragging a bouncing 
shed. 

It was the watchman’s box of one of the constables. 
The old “Leatherhead” who kept the watch had fallen 
asleep inside, and a crowd of scamps had flung a rope 
around it and were dragging it down Broadway while 
the constable howled and turned somersaults, rolling now 
on the back of his fat neck, now on his fat behind with his 
feet in air, and now on either ear or other. 

Of course, the leader of the miscreants was the town’s 
most mischievous scamp, a young fellow named Washington 
Irving. His elder brother, Peter, stood on the sidewalk and 
called to him to desist, but Wash paid him no heed, for 
Peter was known as “Miss” Irving, or “Sissie.” But then 
he was literary, an editor, and a critic, and a knight of the 
tea table. 

The clamor of the running youth and the clatter of 
the watchman’s box sent the horses into a panic of fear. 
They plunged and swerved and Clarence was like to have 
been pitched into the street before he conquered them. Betty 
was rocked and tossed as if she were again at sea, and she 
learned how dangerous a life the carriage people lead. 

Further adventures made her return voyage down Broad¬ 
way memorable, for chimney-sweeps dashed across the path, 
and one drunken fool lurched out of a grogshop and em- 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


162 

braced the Baronet to save himself from falling, while Bare¬ 
foot danced in terror. 

But even death would have been preferable to the climax 
of that journey. Just one thing Betty prayed for to make 
her day perfect, and that was to encounter Mrs. Vansinderen 
and fling mud on her. 

Her prayers were answered literally, for she saw Mrs. 
Vansinderen ahead of her, about to cross where Pine Street 
entered Broadway, and a beautiful mass of slime lay just in 
place —pat for the wheels to splash through and inundate 
Mrs. Vansinderen. 

“Turn here, Clarence!” Betty cried, “Turn here!” 

And Clarence turned. And just as he turned, a huge 
black sow swung past the wheels and rolled under them. 
And as they rolled over her they slipped on her sleek wet 
hide. And the calash careened with a lurch that shot Betty 
full into the mud. She slithered and spun and hurled gouts 
of dirty water upon Mrs. Vansinderen’s skirts. 

But they were not a patch on Betty’s estate. She was a 
total wreck, foul of face and arm and gown. She thrust 
out filthy hands and her tears made runnels down her cheeks. 

It chanced that Monsieur Jumel, knowing that Betty was 
to parade in her new carriage, had left his warehouse and 
gone across to Broadway to witness her triumph. 

But, though the crowd that flooded about her laughed and 
jeered—even Mrs. Vansinderen forgot her own petticoats 
for Betty’s worse disarray—Monsieur Jumel felt no mirth 
in the occasion. His kindly eyes were filled with sorrow for 
her. She was the child whose feast was turned to ruin. 

He ran to pick her up and, slipping, fell with her. 
Blindly she struck at hiiti in her wrath and clambered to 
her feet by grasping at him. Leaving him where he sat 
all muddied, she flung herself into the carriage, which had 
been righted by now, and screamed at Clarence to take her 
home at a gallop down a side street. 

And only now Monsieur Jumel smiled. And not at all 
at her, but at the allegory he made of the man who stoops 
into the mire to lift a woman thence. 


CHAPTER XXIII 


H UMILIATION is a luxury that nobody escapes. From 
the first bewrayments of infancy to the last accidents 
of senility, we furnish contempt to one another by our dis¬ 
comfitures. 

Betty was no more ridiculous than many queens had 
been. Saints and heroes had been pelted with dung and 
drawn through it and cut in quarters afterward. But 
Betty was satisfied. It was enough. She asked no more. 

Huddled, dripping, and smeared, uncleaner than the 
chimney-sweeps that shrieked their smutty jokes at her, she 
was carried through the streets like a disgraced drab; her 
head bowed, her eyes in the crook of her arm, her knees 
hunched up in misery, seeing nobody and seen by every¬ 
body. 

Once at home and out of the glare and snicker of the 
public view, she tore off her soppy finery and scrubbed her¬ 
self red, threw away the slops, and dressed herself in her 
best; but dared not go abroad. She flung herself into a 
chair to brood upon the malice of this life, and wonder when 
she should reach that high plateau where failure and ridicule 
are no longer to be feared. There is no such plateau; or if 
there is no one has ever found it. 

The first pleasant thing she had to do was to summon 
Clarence before her and discharge him. She made no 
pretence of grandeur at this time. She heaped all the blame 
on him and called him every short, hard name she. could 
think of. “Gin-swilling swine” was about the prettiest of 
the terms, and, thanks to her education among the sailors 
of Providence, she was equipped with a vocabulary that 
shook Clarence’s capacious ears. The terms that a rum- 
sodden slave-trader applied to one of his black passengers 

163 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


164 

were among those with which she scathed her ex-coachman. 

He was glad enough to get away without the brand of 
her finger nails and he did not tarry to ask for his wages. 
Indeed, when she waved him out he murmured, “Thank 
you, ma’am.” 

She would not stir from the house by day, and before dark 
Monsieur Jumel himself arrived and tried to solace her. 
She abused him gloriously for buying her that abominable 
carriage and those Benedict Arnold horses, but he under¬ 
stood that it was only her pain that cried and he did not 
answer in kind. His soft words quelled her wrath and she 
consented to sit in his lap like a wounded child. 

The presence of a sympathetic listener brought on a 
fresh supply of tears and wails. She leaned into Jumel’s 
heart as if he were the father whose protection she had 
never known. And there was fatherhood in his heart. But 
much, much more. 

For all her infantile misery and his pity for her, she 
was also a woman of peculiar grace and of a warmth that 
burned. Kissing her hair as one might kiss a baby’s, he 
was drawn into a net of uncanny reticulation, woven for 
the capture of men. 

Looking down into her eyes that looked up into his, he 
watched the tears vanish and only the gleam remain. The 
lashes and the mystic lids rose and fell and a new soul ap¬ 
peared in the depths of the blue grottoes behind her irises. 
The infant inside grew suddenly a witch casting spells upon 
him. 

When his eyes wandered down the tiny ivory pathway 
of her nose, her lips waited in a flower of blood-red petals, 
quivering and silken and sensitive, revealing now and then 
white teeth that bit her lips or the nervous tip of her tongue. 
A strange life was in her lips as if a siren dwelt there 
contriving incantations and perils. 

As she slowly changed from a weeping child to a nymph 
coiled up in his arms, he was bewitched with his long vigil. 
When his glance evaded the sorcery of her face it fell into 
the troubled pool of her milk-white bosom, where the tides 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 165 

of grief surged and slowly calmed to the dreamy ebb and 
flow of her breath. 

The beauty of her breast was an anguish to him, but 
beyond, as he studied her, were her arms, her loins, her 
long thighs, her cunningly turned knees, her slim feet with 
one slipper hung ludicrous on one toe—the little touch that 
rescued her from seeming divine and made her lovably 
human. And then her hands! conferring together, wrestling 
in a grief that seemed to be their very own, soothing each 
other, and finally reaching up to stroke Jumel’s cheek or 
to cling to his hands where they clasped her and at last 
to pinch his thumbs foolishly. 

For a long while he warmed this frightened serpent in 
his bosom and found her so wonderfully made, so com¬ 
plex, complete, entrancing, that just to own her and study 
her seemed to become his future career. 

He half suspected that she was a snake, a Lamia revived 
for his damnation. But there was about her the ancient 
sacredness of the serpent and he felt a call to her priest¬ 
craft. 

He had the Frenchman’s clear vision in business and his 
genuine interest in the truth, but also the Frenchman’s help¬ 
lessness before beauty. He surrendered slowly to the con¬ 
viction that Betty must be his, or he hers at whatever cost. 

In their long communion there was time enough for him 
to ponder the dangers of this situation. 

New York was not Paris. Alliances without the stockade 
of wedlock were numerous enough, but they were sur¬ 
reptitious and shady and carried on with a sneaking guilti¬ 
ness. 

In the older world, they were more or less sanctified by 
ancient custom. They were expected or assumed. Monarchy 
and peerage flaunted them openly. Royal “favorites” 
boasted of their shame, and their children were often en¬ 
nobled in England, France, Italy, everywhere. The princes 
of the churches had their romances as well as the laity, 
and set their by-blows in high places, not only in the armies, 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


166 

but in the temples. The middle class and the peasants car¬ 
ried on the fashion received from above. 

So Jumel looked upon Betty with European eyes. It 
never occurred to him to marry her. Marriage was a 
serious step, a matter of family treaties, settlements, dowries. 
He despised the hypocrisy, the smug behavior of the New 
York merchant who kept his chere mde in hiding, or played 
the cuckoo in other men’s nests. 

He felt a distant reverent envy for those who dwelt to¬ 
gether in honest love. But he did not credit Betty with 
honest love. She had so many other charms that he did 
not despise her for lacking that. But he refused to pretend 
that she had it or risk any trust upon her. 

He was a merchant, an importer. He was about to buy 
a ship or two. He would look carefully into their sea¬ 
worthiness and into the character of the captains he in¬ 
trusted them to. 

He did not consider Betty seaworthy for the transoceanic 
voyage of marriage. But he could not ask for a trimmer; 
jauntier little sloop for a short cruise not too far from 
shore. She would look pretty anchored in a cove. 

He loved her dearly, with several of a man’s many loves: 
first the love one feels for the beggar who stirs him to gen¬ 
erosity and inspires a majestic charity. It had given Jumel a 
noble feeling to be able to toss a coach and pair into her 
beggar’s palms. Second, the love one feels for the pitiful 
thing one bends down to lift from the ground, the bruised 
lamb, the hurt dog, the weeping child, that' gives one the sense 
of a giant’s power expended in mercy. She had moved 
Jumel to brave the laughter of the mob and shame it by pro¬ 
tecting an evil woman in a Christlike way. He loved her, 
too, because he could do the decent thing and take her off the 
streets, rescue her from the degradation she was hurrying 
toward. And it is not every Magdalen that one can rescue 
gracefully and neatly. 

Jumel was quite unaware of the self-gratification of any 
of these loves. He was neither self-conscious nor a prig. 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 167 

None the less, Betty had established herself in his affections 
first by all these means. 

But beyond, above, and encompassing all the reasons 
was her self. She had the immemorial power of certain 
women to render themselves indispensable to certain men. 

She had that physical genius which enthralls, reaches out 
for conquest, fills her scene with perfume and contentment. 
Poets, painters, architects are forgiven for the havocs they 
cause in their ruthless search for the precise word, the pre¬ 
eminent color, the supreme site. 

Parrhasius was admired for crucifying the slave to per¬ 
fect his painting of agony. Bernard de Palissy is forgiven 
for starving his family and burning his furniture in his des¬ 
perate battle for the ideal glaze. 

Columbus is celebrated with statues, though his discovery 
cost the lives of countless wretches who would have lived 
longer and died happier for not being discovered. Even 
at that moment in France a young man named Napoleon 
was being caught up into the skies like a Ganymede by the 
eagle of fame. He was beginning to destroy all nations, in¬ 
cluding his own adopted people, in his relentless gluttony 
for power. And the nation he ruined would make a god 
of him for all time. 

So why should beauty be denied the prerogative of its 
genius for conquest? 

As for Betty, she also had her high purposes. She was 
eager to import into America the classic ambitions of 
Aspasia, Rosa Vanozza, de Maintenon, Jane Shore, Nell 
Gwynne, and the rest of that ambitious sisterhood. 

There were difficulties in her way. She was importing 
velvet to a homespun community. She must toil in the un¬ 
romantic atmosphere of a small city, in a Dutch and Puritan 
atmosphere, and she had to begin with a visiting French¬ 
man. But she did her worst. Devils can do no more. 

She had had poor luck with her first efforts. Delacroix 
had been a dire failure. She had not begun very brilliantly 
with Jumel. But she was on her way to his utter conquest. 

And he was no more the victim of her ambition than she 


168. THE GOLDEN LADDER 

was herself. For she herself was under the imperious spell 
of her own appetite. She was the priestess before her own 
beauty and would sacrifice everything to it. 

She could hardly believe her ears when Jumel haltingly 
unfolded his plan. 

“You stay here no more, ma p’tite. Thees room he is 
not nice for you. You are like a diamond in a coals pail. 
You did promise me you geeve me your soul for a car¬ 
riage. Now I ask you. Geeve! Bring! You come to my 
house, yes?” 

“Yes.” 

“W’en you come?” 

“Now!” 

Her gay promptitude made him laugh till the tears sprang 
from his eyes. And he kissed her heartily. And she, 
clenching him in her arms, kissed him till he was dizzy. . 

She bounded from his lap and began to fling her things 
together, snatching gowns and hats from hooks and rifling 
bureau and closet as if the house were on fire. 

She acted on impulse, as when she had made her sudden 
voyage to France. She never kept an invitation waiting, 
or held back from a gift. It might be withdrawn in the face 
of coquetry or delay. 

While she packed like mad, Jumel asked the landlady for 
her bill. He let her cheat him well. After all, she had 
a hard life and her tenants were difficult and fleeting. 

When Betty was ready to depart he paused to warn her: 

“In my house you go to find perhaps an enemy—Albin 
Bernard, my old valet. He loves me and he is my tyrant. 
Maybe he likes not to have you for the queen.” 

“Oh, I’ll manage Albin all right,’* said Betty, who feared 
nothing just then. 

But when she encountered the valet as he opened the 
door and Jumel made a rather shy explanation of the new 
guest of the house, Betty felt a chill. 

Bernard bowed and let her in, but his eyes had the murky 
glint of a wolfhound’s that will not make friends and pro¬ 
mises some day to spring and slash. 


CHAPTER XXIV 


T^OR the moment the valet’s truculence merely amused 
Betty. She had cried herself out, and could suffer no 
more of shame or fear until the exhausted reservoir of her 
soul had filled up again. 

She pretended not to see the jealousy or the hurt pride 
of the swarthy servant, but thanked him cheerily for bring¬ 
ing her candles and her trunks, and giggled when he closed 
the door on his somber stare. 

She roved about the house, a mere child in a new gar¬ 
ret. She was bursting with delight in her new toy. 

She was actually established in a home of her own; and 
in the fashionable quarter of Pearl Street, right on the cor¬ 
ner of Whitehall! Only one narrow block of houses sepa¬ 
rated her from the Battery with its pleasant walks alter¬ 
nately beaten upon by the sun and the stars, and its seawall 
where the waves beat eternally. 

She wandered from room to room carrying a silver 
candlestick with four bright flames dancing. She lighted 
other candles everywhere and made plans for rearranging 
all the furniture and buying more and more. 

She repaid the purring Jumel well by leaning upon him 
with her arm about him, by frequent thrusting of kisses 
upon his cheeks, by little exclamations and cooing praises 
in his own language: 

“Magnifique! comme c’est joli, ga! Comment j’admire 
cette chose-ci! D’un gout exquis, cela!” 

Soon she had the whole house lighted up as if in honor 
of Evacuation Day. The neighbors across the street won¬ 
dered what was afoot over there. Was some one ill, per¬ 
haps? Were burglars being hunted? There were burglars 
everywhere these nights. But no screams came from the 

169 


170 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

windows, and after a time the lights went out in room after 
room. 

But not in the heart of Monsieur Jumel. Betty had set 
an altar aglow in the chamber of his heart. He adored 
her youth, her beauty, her playful modesties, her skillful, 
willful, amorous bounty. 

The next morning the neighbors saw a handsome calash 
waiting before the stoop. Two glistening black horses stood 
gnashing their bits and a new coachman sat haughtily erect 
in his place with the lines drawn taut and his knees formally 
rigid. 

This was the only announcement to the world that M. 
Jumel’s home was no longer a bachelor establishment. 

Many eyes were at many windows when Betty finally 
came queening down the front steps and seated herself in 
that carriage. There were only three other carriages kept 
on that street, and they were shabby in the presence of this. 

So the eyes at the windows were filled with hate and scorn 
and jealousy. The respectability of the neighborhood was 
outraged. What was the town coming to when a French 
merchant set up a creature of that sort in his house and 
provided her a carriage? 

Jumel had left the horise long since and on foot to open 
his warehouse. But before he commenced his own busy 
day he had seen to it that the new coachman was hired 
and instructed to hitch up Baronet and Barefoot to the 
carriage (after it was duly cleansed of yesterday’s mire) 
and take his stand outside the door until “Madame” should 
be ready to take the air. 

Jumel had stolen from the house as stealthily as a thief 
lest he waken the pretty sleeper. He had kissed only the 
long coil of hair that rolled across her pillow. 

And now he was at his ledgers and toiling among his 
casks of wine, earning money for the amusement of this 
newcomer. 

Browsing among his bargains and computing his mar¬ 
kets and his notes and his chances of profit, his heart 
throbbed with a new comfort. 




THE GOLDEN LADDER 


171 

Her face swam in the air about him and smiled above his 
books as he went over his lists and the advertisements in the 
Commercial Advertiser : 

This day landing. Van Zandt’s Wharf per Barque Martha 
from Bordeaux 100 bbs. Good cargo wine, 3 hhds. vin de Grave; 
old Barsac wine; 10 bottles. 100 cases of liqueurs from Marie 
Brizard; for sale for cash or approved Notes. 

St. Croix Rum, 50 puncheons, landing this day at the Old Slip, 
50 puncheons Jamaica and Antigua Rum, 20 pipes Port-wine 
first quality 10 do. Old Madeira do. 10 do. Lisbon do. Bottled 
Porter in Tierces of 6^4 doz. each, Teneriffe wine in pipes. 

From on board the ship Union from Amsterdam at Burling 
Slip, 35 pipes best Holland Geneva. 

Now landing at Crane Wharf from on board the Swedish 
brig Triton, from Naples, 200 puncheons well flavored 4th and 
5th proof Brandy, 12 hhds. claret. Boorgogne, Champain and 
Oeil de perdrix in boxes of 3 and 4 dozen. 

His life was not all commerce now. He had at home 
waiting for him a beautiful woman whose smiles would 
bless his gains. He had somebody to work for and spend 
his money on. 

And Betty's heart was bounding comfortably, too. She 
had a man working for her—not a brute like Delacroix 
with a wife across the sea, but a man she could call her 
own. He was no giant and he was no longer youthful, 
but there wore compensations there. She was a little 
weary of too vigorous love, and willing to rest awhile. 

She rose when she pleased and, glancing from her window, 
saw' her carriage waiting. She tossed her head with pride. 
Then she paled. 

It would take courage for Betty to go up Broadway again 
after the spill of the day before. But she must face the 
ordeal now, or never ride again. She was immensely sup¬ 
ported by the fact that she was no longer alone in her 
battle with the hateful w'orld; she was at the head of a 
household more pretentious than most of the scornful 
housewives could boast. 

So she made herself as grand as she could and swung 


172 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

down the steps like a Capetian princess. She told her 
coachman, “Up Broadway!” and hoisted her chin as high 
as Marie Antoinette held hers on her death ride. 

She saw that her route was lined with ridicule, and she 
flinched and whitened before it. 

But she knew that laughter easily tires. In a day or 
two she would be accepted as part of the landscape; and 
by and by an institution to be solemnly respected. Yes¬ 
terday’s joke is to-morrow’s religion. 

Still she was glad to return to the shelter of her house. 
The old yellow brick pile was a fortress of refuge, and she 
was tired of eyes and the silent scorn that had flailed her 
all the way. 

When Jumel came home for the midday dinner she was 
ready for him with delicacies she had bought at the mar¬ 
kets. Bernard scowled and sneered at her, but she paid him 
no heed, though she could have wished that at least at 
home she might be spared hostile eyes. 

It pleased Jumel so much to find so much beauty at 
his table that when he went back to his shop he was in¬ 
spired to a superb tribute. 

That very afternoon he completed the purchase of the 
two boats he had bought for his growing business. They 
were named the Gustave V and the Jobytia. 

What a happy thing it would be to name one of them 
after himself and the other after Eliza—for she was Eliza 
or Llise to him. He had not known her in her Betty Bowen 
days, nor as Madame Delacroix, but only as Eliza Browne. 

Even Me Laloi had fallen into the habit of calling her 
Mees Browne during the chaotic interregnum between her 
more regular affairs. 

That evening, then, Monsieur Stephen Jumel took home 
to supper the wonderful news that in the harbor were two 
boats wearing the names of two lovers: the good brig The 
Stephen, and the neat bark, The Elisa. 

Betty breathed deep of this distinction. A winged ship 
was to bear her name across the world. If only her mother 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


173 

could know of this! Her mother was dead and Eliza was 
not really Betty’s name. But she had followed her mother’s 
counsel and she was a success. The name did not matter. 

After a moment of exaltation she sprang into the lap of 
Monsieur Jumel and told him how grand a man he was 
and how much she loved him. 

The next day he took her to the wharf and showed her 
the bark. The master told her it was “pretty nearly a 
ship, all except the yards on the after-mast.” A man was 
already swung over the stern, painting out the legend Jobyna 
and painting in the name Eliza. 

There was only one little fly in the ointment of Betty’s 
glory. She could have wished that her namesake boat could 
have borne the name of “Madame Jumel.” 

But sufficient for the day was the height she had reached. 

She told the master to be very careful of her “pretty nearly 
ship” and keep her out of storms and off the rocks and bring 
her back safe to harbor. 

“Wishing you the same for yourself, Miss,” said the 
master with more heartiness than tact. 

Monsieur Jumel had wine aboard and the health of the 
bark and of the brig was drunk again and again. 

He took such delight in heaping gifts upon Betty that 
he would make her a lady indeed. She must have a slave 
to wait upon her. 

The slave market at the foot of Wall Street had been 
closed for forty years. It had been a little longer than 
that since one could read advertisements such as this: 

Just arrived from Great Britain and are to be sold on board 
the ship Alice and Elizabeth several likely Welsh and English 
servantmen, also several negro girls and a negro boy and like¬ 
wise good Cheshire cheese.” 

White slaves were no longer sold and negroes were no 
longer burned alive for conspiracy. Slave girls were not 
sent “on approval.” 

And yet in that afternoon’s Evening Post Betty read: 


174 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

For sale—a likely Negro Wench, 16 years old—sold for no 
fault. For terms enquire of William Leaycroft, 107 Liberty 
Street. 

So Betty went to Liberty Street and inspected the girl, 
who won her heart by begging to be bought by so beautiful 
a lady. Betty needed no more recommendation. She hag¬ 
gled a little over the price of so much dark meat, paid down 
fifty pounds in money, and marched off with her captive. 

A law had been passed a while back to the effect that 
all negro children born after July 4th, I799> should be 
bom “free/’ though the word was rather magnificent for 
the liberty conferred, since, after all, the males were to be 
apprenticed till they were twenty-eight and the females till 
they were twenty-five. And that meant that their youth 
and their hopes would be pretty well quenched by the 
practical slavery of apprenticeship. Still, it solved the 
slavery problem for New York without expense of haste, 
of money, or of blood. Aaron Burr had tried to pass a bill 
abolishing slavery entirely and at once, but it had been re¬ 
jected. 

There were certainly no compunctions in Betty’s heart 
against the ownership of this sooty sister. She had been 
born in Providence where slaves were a staple of com¬ 
merce. 

And now she had a carriage, a ship, and a slave. And 
yet she was not content. 


CHAPTER XXV 


T HERE was no lack of amusement in the town. Jumel 
was always glad to take her to the Park Theater, a 
magnificent building that had cost a hundred thousand dol¬ 
lars and more. He was generous enough to leave his shop 
in time to be present for the rising of the curtain at half 
past six. He never begrudged the two dollars it cost them 
for two seats in a box, where the rats that scampered 
through the pit could not reach her. Often they took 
Rlie Laloi along with them, and being a learned, bookful 
fellow now, he told Betty what to admire and why. 

She loved Marlowe’s “Jew of Malta” and Otway’s 
“Venice Preserved,” and Sheridan and Fielding made her 
laugh herself sick. Shakespeare was also a very good writer, 
as Laloi informed her, and his plays were interesting as 
well as instructive and of highly moral character. “Ham¬ 
let” was particularly useful to any woman who might be 
tempted to marry the murderer of her husband, especially 
when he was her brother-in-law. “Othello” taught that 
ladies should not marry men of too dark a complexion 
and that husbands should not grow too jealous over mis¬ 
placed handkerchiefs. 

There was even more thrill in attending the trials in 
court, and the dangers of circumstantial evidence shown 
in “Othello” were emphasized in such a case as that of 
Levi Weeks, who took the pretty Juliana Sands out for 
a ride on a Sunday and did not bring her back. When 
her body was found next Thursday in the well dug by 
Col. Aaron Burr’s Manhattan company, they arrested Levi 
and charged him with murder. 

He engaged the best three lawyers in town, General 
Alexander Hamilton, Colonel Aaron Burr, and Mr. Brock- 

175 


176 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

hoist Livingston. Betty was spellbound by the drama which 
was not rehearsed and fixed, but written by the actors as 
they went along. General Hamilton was a great orator 
for so little a man, but it needed more than music to con¬ 
vince that jury that Weeks was innocent. The evidence 
against him was overwhelming and there was one witness 
whose testimony could not be shaken. He was as ugly as 
his cruel evidence and Colonel Burr realized that he could 
not save his client unless he broke this witness. He kept 
hammering him and insinuating that he had some peculiarly 
good reason for charging Mr. Weeks with the crime. Finally 
it grew dark in the courtroom and the candles were lighted. 

The suspense grew more unbearable in the dark and 
Colonel Burr had driven the witness almost out of his 
mind by his attacks, when, suddenly, he seized two big 
candlesticks, one in each hand, and, thrusting them like 
flaming swords almost into the face of the astounded wit¬ 
ness, he cried: 

“Gentlemen, behold the murderer!” 

The witness gaped, recoiled, and, rising, dashed out of 
the room. The jury acquitted young Mr. Weeks. 

Of course he was guilty, but Betty was glad he got off, 
since she knew his uncle well. His uncle had built the 
City Hotel and was a very polite man. 

Betty felt grateful to Colonel Burr for his cleverness. 
He had no more reverence for the law than she had. He 
said, “law is whatever is boldly asserted and plausibly 
maintained.” That was Betty’s opinion of the law after 
her experience in France. 

She wished she might tell Colonel Burr how thrilled she 
had been by his acting. He had a fascinating reputation 
as a rake, the most graceful of profligates. He was even 
more gallant than General Alexander Hamilton, who had 
a wife and adored her, though his fancies strayed. But 
somehow Hamilton and Burr, however they circled round 
each other in the bonds of mutual repulsion, never wandered 
into Betty’s circle. 

For one thing, New York had touched sixty thousand 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


1 77 

in 1800, and was growing so fast that nobody could know 
everybody. Nearly everybody knew Betty and her carriage 
by sight, for there were few carriages and only one Betty. 
But not many people spoke to her. 

Betty did not dabble in politics. It was—they were—too 
complicated and too noisy for her. They had all the ferocity 
of Parisian politics except that the guillotine was never in¬ 
voked. Men shot at each other instead. And sometimes 
somebody got hit, though not often. 

When a Mr. Church said that Colonel Burr had done 
a political favor for money, Colonel Burr called him out, 
and missed him and was missed by him. 

Mr. James Monroe, who had been in Paris when Betty 
was there, quarreled with General Hamilton over Hamil¬ 
ton's acknowledged amour with Mrs. Reynolds, and a duel 
was planned. Monroe named Burr as his second, but the 
duel was aborted. 

Politics was all mixed up with love-affairs and discus¬ 
sions of the private character of public men. Whatever 
their characters, few of them had a shred of reputation 
left. 

Burr and Hamilton were said to be rivals for the same 
woman, and Hamilton’s implacable wrath was explained as 
due to Burr’s success with her. 

Hamilton called Burr “a voluptuary by system” and ac¬ 
cused him of “profligacy unrestrained by any moral senti¬ 
ments and defying all decencies.” Hamilton founded a 
newspaper, the Evening Post, and the editor, Cheetham, 
berated Burr incessantly. He even got out handbills calling 
Burr a wholesale and remorseless seducer who filled the 
brothels of New York with his victims and was being 
pursued by at least one revengeful father. Cheetham ac¬ 
cused Burr of dancing with negresses—perhaps because 
Burr was in favor of emancipating the slaves at once. 

But President John Adams called Hamilton a debauchee 
who had “given inquietude to the first families” by “auda¬ 
cious and unblushing attempts upon ladies of the highest 


178 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

rank and purest virtue/’ Adams said that Hamilton’s rage 
against Burr was “an absolute delirium.” 

But the story was told of President Adams (and it de¬ 
feated him later) that he had imported three mistresses 
from England and, finding them too many to amuse, sent 
them back at the public expense. 

Burr called Hamilton “the little bastard” once, and then 
apologized because, after all Hamilton had been a love- 
child ; and Burr believed very much in love. 

Hamilton hated Adams and Jefferson almost as much as 
he hated Burr, and he despised and distrusted the People 
and the Constitution, which he called a “crazy old hulk” and 
“a cheap and useless fabric.” 

Jefferson’s love of France and republicanism revolted 
Hamilton, the lover of England and aristocracy. Jefferson 
also was tarred with slander, sued by a free negress for the 
support of their child. As for his slaves, Jefferson said 
that when any of his blacks ran away he never set the 
bloodhounds after them if they happened to be his own 
children. 

Jefferson in his turn abhorred Hamilton and Adams 
and Burr. They had all at times abhorred Washington, but, 
now that he was dead, they turned on one another. 

Jefferson called Hamilton “the evil genius of this 
country.” Hamilton, who was an ardent Churchman, called 
Jefferson “an atheist in religion and a fanatic in politics.” 
Imagine the horror of Hamilton, when in the next election 
for President, Jefferson and Burr were tied. 

Burr had the greater number of members voting for 
him, but Jefferson had the greater number of states. Jef¬ 
ferson was on the ground, fighting for the Presidency; Burr 
kept four hundred miles away. It was said that he could 
have won the election if he had intervened in person, but 
he had his own ideas of dignity. 

After a fearful suspense and an odious period of trading, 
Jefferson won the election and Burr, as second, became Vice- 
President at the age of forty-five. 

He had been a brave soldier, and would have been made 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


179 


a general if Hamilton had not prevented his appointment. 
He had been a Senator. He had declined a seat on the 
Supreme Court bench. Then Burr began to miss everything 
—to be a nearly man. He was nearly elected Governor of 
New York; nearly appointed minister to France; nearly 
elected President—actually elected to that nearly-an-office 
of Vice-President. 

But still the rivalry with Hamilton went on. Hamilton 
dreaded Burr because Burr was demagogue enough to pro¬ 
pose that the people should vote directly for the Presi¬ 
dent, which would manifestly reduce the country to ruins 
at once. Hamilton could not even believe in Burr’s belief 
in popular government. He called Burr “a man who, 
despising democracy, has chimed in with all its absurdities.” 

It was amazing how bitter Hamilton was. He and Burr 
were polite in public. Burr dined at Hamilton’s house and 
Theodosia Burr was a friend of Hamilton’s daughters. Yet 
Hamilton could not let Burr survive. 

In nothing did Hamilton differ more from Burr than in 
his attitude toward women and their alleged “rights.” One 
of Hamilton’s greatest disgusts for Burr was based on his 
“rank Godwinism.” William Godwin was the English 
clergyman who gave up the pulpit because its creeds con¬ 
flicted with his new theories: he believed in an intellectual 
republic based on universal benevolence! He believed that 
women should have political rights and he believed in di¬ 
vorce ! He met and eventually married an all-defying 
school-teacher named Mary Wollstonecraft, who also be¬ 
lieved in the anarchy that women had the right to education 
as well as the vote. Manifestly, if you started educating 
females and letting everybody vote, the world was at an 
end, and well lost. 

Burr was a Godwinist. He believed in a true republic. 
He was so gallant with women that he could deny them 
nothing, not even a mind. When his wife died, he made 
a career of his daughter’s spiritual welfare. “I hope by 
her,” he wrote, “to convince the world what neither sex 
appear to believe—that women have souls.” 


180 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

He made Theodosia study Latin, Greek, French, the piano, 
dancing, skating. He even urged her to read an abominably 
irreverent history of Rome recently published serially by a 
scoffer named Gibbon. Burr made Theodosia the best edu¬ 
cated woman of her nation and one of its noblest. 

From her fourteenth year Theodosia ruled over his heart 
and his household. He bought the home occupied for a time 
by President Washington, “Richmond Hill” he called it, and 
there with his daughter at the head of the table he enter¬ 
tained Talleyrand, Jerome Bonaparte, Volney, Louis 
Philippe, all the brilliant visitors to the new republic. 

And then Theodosia married Joseph Alston, who later 
became Governor of South Carolina. She moved thither 
with him—twenty days away from New York. 

A French girl whom Burr had adopted was married 
about the same time. He was left alone without wife, 
daughter, or foster child. 

So his heart ran about seeking some woman to love. 
He almost married a Philadelphienne, but she hurt his 
pride. He had other loves and wrote his daughter about 
them. But fate was saving him for Betty, whom he had 
never met. 

Burr had a bad name even among the bad names of 
those bad days, but he said: “I never had an amour in 
my life in which I was not met halfway. I would be 
the last man on earth to make such advances where they 
were not welcome. Nor did I ever do, or say, or write 
anything which threw a cloud over a woman’s name. No 
woman can lay her ruin at my door.” 

Where was the truth in all these hailstorms of slander? 
Betty was openly wicked, yet, if she could believe half that 
she heard, she was only leading the life of the great majority 
and of the majority of the great. 

While each political party claimed the highest ideals for 
itself, it stooped to every trick to outwit the other. If what 
each party said of the other were true, the country was indeed 
a nation of blacklegs, dissolute thieves, and tyrants, drifting 
down to a well-deserved destruction. 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


181 

There was small encouragement to respectability in such 
contemptible days. The highest statesmen were (if one could 
believe half that one heard and read) as dishonorable in love 
as in politics. 

But a strange indifference for men had come over Betty. 
The ease of their conquest robbed it of excitement and it 
was no novelty. She was tired of men playing the same 
old game for the same old stakes. 

Betty had enjoyed a plenty of evil, and more was always 
to be had for just not refusing it. Now that she was known 
everywhere as Monsieur Jumel’s housekeeper, men had a 
little less respect for her than before. Their courtesies were 
as transparent as cheap cheesecloth. Their mock chivalries 
insulted her unbearably, especially as she felt a certain loyalty 
to her keeper, and Monsieur Jumel insisted upon regularity 
and seemliness in everything except the legal and the sacred 
bond. 

What Betty longed for with a longing aggravating rapidly 
to a mania was Respectability. She wanted to be a lady and 
among the ladies sit. 

She wanted to be spoken to on the street by those clear¬ 
eyed, high-headed women who had honesty for their glory. 
She wanted to be invited into the homes where a good name 
and a clean past were the only open-sesames. She wanted 
to talk about children and how to raise them and keep them 
good and marry them well. 

Foreigners were saying that American women were the 
most beautiful and the most fashionable in the world till 
they reached twenty-five, and then they drooped into old age 
and shabbiness. Betty would have swopped her youth and 
her bright beauty for the apparently inaccessible privilege 
of growing dowdy and pallid in a home of her own. 

The dazzling balls and dinners—the “parties” as they were 
being called nowadays—tempted her, too. She ached with 
the exile from those gleaming companies where, after the 
food was eaten and the wine drunk, everybody was “bored” 
until the card tables were brought out and gambling saved 
people from the impossible task of conversation. 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


182 

But she would have been glad enough to be admitted to 
the shabbiest of the gatherings, to the church meetings, to 
the charitable projects of Miss Isabella Graham who had just 
founded the first Missionary Society and was planning others. 

One night when she sat with Jumel and Laloi in a box at 
“The West Indian/’ two young men began to make fun of 
Mr. Eacker, the Democratic politician, in another box. They 
ridiculed a Fourth of July speech he had made. One of 
the lads was the son of General Hamilton. Mr. Eacker 
grew wroth at this impudence and, calling them out in the 
lobby, boxed their ears. They challenged him to a duel. 
Everybody challenged everybody to a duel for anything. 

Betty went home in grave distress. Why must the bullets 
fly for a careless word? The next Sunday Mr. Eacker 
fought his first duel over at Weehawken, and nobody was 
hurt. On Monday afternoon young Philip Hamilton went 
over, and came back to his father’s house with a bullet 
through him and his own pistol undischarged. 

Betty paced up and down before “The Grange,” the beauti¬ 
ful home of the Hamiltons, and heard the mother scream 
when the boy died in her arms. But she dared not go in. 
She dared not go to the funeral. 

She had no place among the mothers. 

She felt how precious a thing it is to be permitted to 
offer sympathy, to be clung to and wept upon by a good 
soul in agony. 

She wanted above all things to be a wife and a mother. 
She would give her beautiful carriage and her dear horses 
and her delightful home in Whitehall Street for a wedding 
ring and a good home. Strange, the different uses of that 
word “mistress.” Spell it out and pronounce it with the 
hissing “s” and it means shame. Abbreviate it to “Mrs.” 
and call it “Mizzuz” and it means honor and the shelter 
of respect. 

She hinted what was in her soul to Monsieur Jumel. It 
was the only hint he would not take. 

She begged him flatly to marry her and he flatly refused. 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 183 

He would not even take her seriously. He shook his head 
and smiled and said: 

“Non, non, ma belle!” 

Slowly she grew to hate him for his gentle obstinacy. He 
was crueller in his meekness than the brutal Delacroix. She 
accused him even in her own heart of being her first and 
only betrayer. She brooded upon revenge. The revenge 
she chose was that he should marry her in spite of himself. 

She would be honest if she had to be dishonest to 
achieve it. 

One night when he begged her not to ask the impossible, 
she set a sudden pistol to his head and vowed that she would 
fire if he did not marry her forthwith. 

He smiled again, as cool and gay as an emigre at the 
guillotine's edge, and shrugged his shoulders Frenchily, 
folded his arms, and laughed: 

“Feu! faites feu! ma mie.” 

The command so startled her that her finger pulled the 
trigger and he might have died but for the fact that she had 
forgotten to load the weapon. 

She flung it down and wept. And her tears melted him 
as always to a great tenderness. He offered her everything 
but his name. 

His caresses maddened her and she flung his hands aside 
and, running to another room, locked herself in and pondered 
in the dark. 

She thought long and clearly. And at last a scheme 
occurred to her that might work. It was her last trick, and 
if it failed she would have to try another man. For she 
would have a husband at anv cost soever. 


CHAPTER XXVI 


I T was not that Betty had no friends. She had numbers 
of them and they were bent on hilarity. They gave New 
York a touch of Paris in small. 

But it was a submarine hilarity they enjoyed. Their 
haunts were grottoes. The shadow of the submersion was 
upon them. 

Some of the members of this clique were on the way up, 
but, like herself, they came from the depths and had some 
of the ooze still clinging about them. 

Most of them came down from the surface and were on 
their way to the ooze. 

Down from the top came, for instance, Mrs. Dolly Beadle- 
stone, a lady of great name. She sank like a galleon 
shattered in a battle. She had cruised about in the sunlight 
too recklessly. Her husband had come home at the wrong 
time once, and then no more at all. There was a duel and 
her lover killed her husband and fled without taking her 
along. After a brief flurry of being the town’s chief buzz, 
Mrs. Beadlestone was no longer being spoken to nor spoken 
about, except in the dim circles where Betty swam. 

One of Betty’s gallants was Jacob Orttery, a gentleman 
of the first family; but he would neither stay sober nor get 
quietly drunk like a gentleman. He disgusted the genial 
Jumel, who loved to dance and to mellow himself with wine, 
but abhorred excess. Elie Laloi could not endure Betty’s 
new friends and gradually withdrew into his bookstore as 
into the cave where a hermit walls himself in. But Betty 
loved to be with Mrs. Beadlestone and with Orttery because 
they taught her the mysterious lore of the world they had 
left and she had never known. Orttery had had his ad¬ 
ventures in that upper realm and it comforted Betty to hear 

184 



THE GOLDEN LADDER 


1&5 

him mumble the names of still respected ladies who were 
wicked but had not yet foundered in a storm of gossip. She 
gained a little from the dingy comfort of saying to herself: 
‘‘There are hypocrites up there who are worse than I am; 
only they haven’t been found out.” This was flimsy con¬ 
solation, but she bettered it by saying: “If I had their 
chances, their homes, and families, I’d be the best little 
wife on earth.” 

She felt the glow of imaginary virtue and was vicariously 
respectable. 

She encountered now and then gentlemen and ladies of 
eminent tone who were just peering down into the depths, 
flirting with disaster, dipping below the surface, like ospreys 
that pounce from above and cleave the water a little, then 
beat their way back to the air. 

But there was a curiosity and a condescension about these 
people that offended Betty. It did not flatter her to be 
considered an adventure by a timid gentleman, or a strange 
animal by an inquisitive lady. 

In the midst of some turtle feast on a moonlit shore she 
would grow bitter and shudder with disgust for her com¬ 
panions who were holding her down instead of helping her 
to rise. 

Wandering the “geometrical gardens of elegant ex¬ 
cellence” of the Vauxhall Gardens with some rich tanner 
from “the Swamp,” whose wife was out of town, she would 
sicken at his flatteries and long to strike him back-handed 
across the face that sneered while it smiled. 

She had enjoyed Vauxhall when it was downtown. Then 
a Frenchman named Delacroix, who was not her Dela¬ 
croix, had bought the resort and shifted it to “Bayard’s 
Mount.” 

She quit going there when the name Delacroix came to 
mean her most dismal crash down the ladder. But time had 
hardened her to the sound and started her up the rungs 
again. When, then, in 1803 Monsieur Delacroix leased from 
Mr. J. J. Astor the old flower gardens kept by the Swiss 
Sperry a mile out in the Bowery road, she was often there. 



186 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

While Jumel was chattering French with Madame Dela¬ 
croix and her two mademoiselles, Betty would saunter the 
gardens among the statues and the busts and the gleaming 
lamps ambushed in the shrubbery. But the fireworks made 

her sad. . 

She found a something akin to her own ambitions in the 
aspiring fires that climbed the dark sky and always failed, 
returning to oblivion in a weeping of shattered sparks. 

Her heart went up like one of the little lighted balloons 
rising, rising, then wavering, drifting, and finally going 
wretchedly out or bursting into a brief flame and lapsing 
again to earth. 

Even when she forgot to be morose, and the wine or the 
music or the jokes of some comedian made her laugh aloud, 
she would catch a glance of scorn from somebody at another 
table. Or some woman passing her would draw her skirts 
aside or give her a slanting regard of disdain. 

Then her heart would cry out anew for the right to disdain 
others. 

If she had been brought up as straitly as some of her 
companions she might have been glad to escape from the 
leashes of good behavior. But the leashes that held her 
were the thongs of her miserable origin and her after¬ 
conduct. 

She was most horribly tempted toward virtue and con¬ 
formity. Her companions did not share her longings, except 
one —Dolly Beadlestone, who had been spilled out of the 
lap of respectability. She wanted to get back and could 
not. 

She understood when Betty moaned one night at Vauxhall: 

“If Fd ever have been where you were, I’d have stayed 
there.” 

“Oh no, you wouldn’t!” Dolly laughed, and immediately 
ceased to laugh, and sighed: “It was nice! To have a 
father and mother taking you to church; to have a decent 
young man make love to you, as if you were sacred; to 
have a husband who took you to a church to marry, and 
went there every Sabbath at your side; to have babies and 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


187 

pray for them and pray over them and nurse them and 
dress them, and fight for them against death, and cry across 
their little coffins and put flowers on their little graves while 
you wept in the arms of their father—yes, it was beautiful. 
I had ’em all and they tired me. But not half as much as 
this tires me. Yes, I understand why you want them. I 
hope you get them all. I hope you’ll grow so respectable 
that you’ll cut me as dead as I would have cut you a 
year ago.” 

Betty squeezed her hand and groaned, “But Jumel won’t 
marry me.” 

“Have you asked him to?” 

“Yes. But he only laughs.” 

“And he looks such a kind old gentleman. I’ll ask him.” 

“You wouldn’t dare.” 

“Stay here and watch me.” 

Betty sank down on a stone bench by a marble urn and 
looked like a starlit statue, a seated mourning figure, while 
she watched from the dark Dolly’s advance on Jumel where 
he sat clinking wineglasses with an exiled French duke. 

She saw him turn and rise at Dolly’s approach and, ex¬ 
cusing himself from his crony, accompany her into the 
garden. She could not hear what Dolly said till their 
slow steps were crunching the gravel within a few yards 
of her retreat. 

They paused almost at her shoulder and she cowered into 
the shadow so that Jumel did not see her as he grazed past. 

He halted a little beyond and Betty heard him say: 

“Non, non. You ask imposseebles. Eliza is nice gerl but 
a wife is anuzzer lady altogezzer. I do not like for my wife 
somebody who knows too well already w’at a hosban’ weesh 
to teach. Eef Eliza finds gentlamans who weesh for marry 
her, she is free. I say no word. I make like I never did 
see her beefore. But to marry me to Eliza? Non, non, 
madame! Non, non, madame! ,f 

Dolly tossed her hands in despair and turned away. Jumel 
went back to his friend and the brims of their glasses met 
again. Dolly rejoined Betty in the shadow. 


CHAPTER XXVII 


O NE Sunday when good people did not drive about, 
Dolly and Betty and Mr. Orttery drove away from 
the stifling town and the chained streets, out Breakneck 
Hill and on toward the narrowest tip of the island, where 
the Harlem floweddnto the Hudson. 

High on a bulwark of land set in the V of the two rivers, 
sat an old house that caught Betty’s eye and gripped her 
heart with a curious power. 

“What place is that ?” she gasped. 

Mr. Orttery, who was not yet quite drunk for the day, 
explained: 

“Thass the Morris House—ol’ Colonel Morris’s house— 
who came over from Engl’n’ with ol’ Gener’l Braddock and 
went out to fight the Injuns—and wouldn’t take advice of 
young Colonel George Washin’son and got ambushcated and 
mortally killed. But good ol’ Curl Morse only got wounded. 
So he came to N’York and fell in love with pretty Mary 
Philipse. And so did Georzh Wash’n’son; only Georzh was 
a little bit timid and let Curl Morrison carry off blush’n’ 
bride—sweet lady she was, too. 

“When Revolution broke out, Curl Morse couldn’t make 
up his mind to fight for Engl’n’, nor yet to fight agains’ 
Engl’n’, so he went over to Engl’n’ to think it over, leavin’ 
poor Mary and children on this side ocean. 

“Well, when the immoral—the immortal George Wash- 
ingt-t-ton retreated from N’York to Harlem here, he took 
Morrisouse for headquarters. But Mary had moved out to 
Yonkers. 

“She owned house in Whitehall Street—right near where 
you live, my dear, but it was burn’dup in great fire of 
’Seventy-shixh. George Wash’n’n wanted to burn the ol’ 

188 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


189 

town down when he retreated, but Congress wouldn’t let 
him, so a lot of good Americans went in and tried to burn 
it down, anyway. British shot a lot of ’em, and hung some 
more—one of ’em was Nathan Hale, as you rememmer, no 
doubt, my dear.” 

“How could I remember him? I was only one year old 

in seventy-six-” Betty caught herself too late. She 

also caught Dolly Beadlestone doing a bit of mathematics 
in the back room of her head; she could tell this by that 
look a woman’s eye takes on while she is figuring out when 
a person was born or is to be born. 

Betty had betrayed the fact that she was far past the 
twenty-one years she had confessed to. But Orttery was 
gallant enough even in his woolly wits to say: 

“You weren’t born in seven-six, my dear—or even 
dreamed of.” 

She squeezed his arm for that. 

The horses trotted on, and the house drew nearer and 
nearer like an oncoming ship, like her very own ship. She 
shook the yawning Orttery and said: 

“Tell me more.” 

“Well, when they hung poor Hale, he said—but you 
learned in school what he said.” 

“I never went to school.” 

“Well, he said-” 

“I don’t care what he said. Who owns that house now?” 

“I don’ know. It was a tavern for a long while. I 
rememmer when the stages for Albany use’ to change 
horses there. But it’s only a farmhouse now. In the good 
ol’ days we could have stopped and got a drink there. And 
I need one—horribalilly!” 

As the horses bent to the steep winding road the house 
was swept out of view by jutting rocks or sudden walls 
of foliage, and swept in again by abrupt clearings. A some¬ 
thing tugged at Betty’s heart. The road lifted her into a 
purer air and her heart began to wish for a home, this home. 

When the panting horses stopped at the peak of the hill 
her eyes beheld the colossal highway of the Hudson parad- 




THE GOLDEN LADDER 


190 

ing in silver armor along its titanic parapet. She turned 
her head, and far below was the little Harlem loitering 
toward the hidden meeting place. Far off to the east across 
a wilderness of fields and trees was the tinsel thread of the 
Bronx. 

In a sea of green fields and forests the villages of Harlem, 
of Westchester and Morrisania lay like scattered toys. The 
steely shield of the Sound gleamed in the farthest east, and 
she could see where it narrowed into the East River and 
fretted itself through Hell Gate down about the islands to 
the bay. 

In the water, boats traveled like flies or butterflies. 
Beyond the city and its smoke and the dancing waters of the 
bay she could descry Staten Island on the southernmost rim 
of the visible world. Thirteen counties were within eye- 
reach from this point. 

Betty felt herself a very eagle in an eyrie, scanning the 
nether earth. Her fine long nose grew aquiline with haughti¬ 
ness and that withdrawn remote disdain which is the 
supreme luxury of well-being. 

The farmer who dwelt shabbily on this Mount Pisgah 
studied the wayfarers with amusement. 

When Orttery said, “Could I buy a bottle of bran’y 
here ?” 

“No, sir; that you cannot.” (Orttery’s frown deepened.) 
“I sell no liquor on the Sabbath.” (Orttery’s chin fell to 
his breastbone.) “But I will give you some ale of my own 
brew.” 

The passengers descended to shake the dust from their 
clothes and slake the dust in their throats with the farmer’s 
sudsy ale, while the horses oated. 

Seen close at hand the house lost all its majesty—like 
some historic queen to whom one comes too near. The walls 
were dingy. The company about the place was sordid— 
hostlers, cattle-drovers, ’prentice hands and negro slaves all 
stupidly basking in a Sunday leisure. 

The house had long since forgone the rural innocence it 
wore when Yantie Kiersen and her husband sold it for “one 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


191 

thousand pounds of good and lawful money of New York” 
to James Carroll, who for a while sent garden produce, 
cherries, and quinces to the York markets, and then ad¬ 
vertised it in the Post Boy of 1765, boasting “it commands 
the finest Prospect in the whole country; the Land runs 
from River to River, there is Fishing, Oystering, and 
Claming at either End.” 

The house, like a country girl taken up by a lord, had 
known splendor in the hands of Morris. It had known 
martial glory and pain. It had watched the troops of Wash¬ 
ington driven in chaos up from the town, had seen young 
Major Aaron Burr heroically rescue the forgotten troops 
of the rear guard from destruction. It had heard the British 
bugles sound the fox call, the “View halloo!” in derision 
for the rebels who slunk through the coverts with dust on 
their lolling tongues. 

The house had furnished George Washington and his 
staff with protection. He had slept beneath its shingles and 
held war councils and courts martial in its parlors. The 
gardens had been filled with breastworks. 

When Fort Washington was captured by the British, the 
house fell with it. General Lord Percy and Admiral Lord 
Howe and General Sir Henry Clinton had made it bloom 
with scarlet uniforms. Mary Philipse Morris came back 
from Yonkers, where she had dwelt under the protection 
of Washington, though he had arrested her brother. 

Then the Hessians under von Knyphausen and Von Loss- 
burg took over the house. It was coming down in the world, 
shifting about, a mere trull among the military. 

Mary Morris and her husband and both their families 
were attainted of treason to the new republic and denounced 
as felons, their lives and their lands held forfeit. When 
the British troops marched out of the ashen wreckage of 
New York, the Morrises retreated with them, carrying off 
their lives and leaving their other properties to be seized 
by the government and sold at vendue to strangers. 

While Betty and her party stood at the edge of the height, 
regarding the encircling scene as from a hub, a littlish man 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


192 

came into the garden with a floridly pretty lady. The 
gentlemen swept their hats from their perukes to their sides 
and then put them on again, but did not speak, nor introduce 
their women to each other. This was as the women liked it, 
for they expressed their contempt of their own levity by 
despising it in others, in a kind of vicarious repentance. 

Betty recognized the man as Aaron Burr, but no one knew 
his companion’s name. They envied her the soft look in 
those unequaled eyes of his. As Jumel and Betty, Dolly 
and Orttery filed through the gate, the farmer mumbled: 

“That’s the Vice-President. He can’t make up his mind 
but what he’ll buy this place, or swop it for his house on 
Richmond Hill.” 

Betty’s heart quickened suddenly. She had liked the 
mansion before. Learning that so elegant a gentleman as 
Burr was considering it for himself, she wanted it 
desperately. 

As Jumel was helping her elbow into the carriage, she 
whirled round, and pleaded: 

“Buy me that house, Stephen.” 

“Comment? W’at you hask?” 

“Auriez-vous la bonte de — de — m’acheter cette maison-la.” 

“I hunderstan’ you the firs’ time,” Jumel answered, with 
unwonted asperity. “But those house she is pretty damn 
far from my bureau —yes?” 

Betty sighed. She felt herself pyretty damned far from 
one more ambition. She saw that she had hurt Jumel by 
her greed. She must not let him think her grasping, and 
she spoke with the meekness of a hurt child: 

“I was thinking only of you, Stephen. It would be a 
pretty place for you to rest after your hard work.” 

He smiled at the ingenuity of this, but was skeptical still 
of her sincerity. He loved to give, but hated to be asked. 

And Betty hated him for seeing through her and for 
refusing her request. She grew a little more determined 
than ever to revenge herself upon him by becoming his wife. 

To possess this mansion would solve one of her remaining 
problems in life. But she said nothing more about it, and 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


193 

was so gay on the way back that Jumel was sure she had 
not really meant to squander a fortune on so quiet a retreat. 
He assumed that he had won another victory, and invited 
her to join him on his brig The Stephen which was to sail 
for Providence. 

But the word “Providence” alarmed her. She was not 
ready yet to go back. She had no triumphs to take home. 
And she could not trust herself there with Jumel. Some¬ 
body would surely come up to her and accost her under her 
old name, and remember too much. 

So she repeated the trick she had played on Delacroix 
and suddenly became too ill to attempt a voyage, yet again 
not quite ill enough to keep him at home. 

He sailed away. 


CHAPTER XXVIII 


I N Mrs. Dolly Beadlestone’s retinue was the physician, 
Doctor Ketelkas, whom Betty had called upon when 
Captain Carpenter died at her house. He was held in higher 
esteem among his fellows in medicine than Mrs. Beadle- 
stone among her late associations; but his interest in Dolly 
was outside his craft. 

One aftemon while he was calling on Mrs. Beadlestone, 
Betty came in clamorously. She was in a palsy of wrath 
and humiliation. Dolly applied hartshorn to her nostrils 
in vain and she did not grow calm until Doctor Ketelkas 
started to bandage her arm and bleed her. Then she resumed 
control of herself and explained her vapors. 

As she was driving in her carriage, collecting snubs and 
ridicule, she had seen a boy run across Broadway, flying a 
kite. This frightened the horses of a huge stage rolling 
out to Boston and the horses, swerving from a pile of manure 
in the middle of the road, ran up on the walk and knocked 
over a little girl. She was trampled under and cut with 
horseshoes, and the driver checked his stage just before a 
wheel crushed her ribs. The tire-marks had already blotched 
her dress. 

Betty, who had an extraordinary affection for other 
people's children, had cried to her coachman to stop and had 
run to the side of the terror-stricken girl. She had her 
lifted into her own carriage and had driven with her to the 
nearest doctor’s. 

if l took her to your house, Doctor Ketelkas. Your wife 
came to the door, Doctor Ketelkas. She said you were not 
at home. She took the child from my arms, but didn’t 
invite me in, Doctor Ketelkas. When I made to follow her 
she swung the door shut in my face, Doctor Ketelkas! And 
crushed my thumb, too! 


194 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 195 

I should have fainted, but I wouldn’t give her the pleasure 
of knowing she had hurt me, and I didn’t even cry out.” 

She made up for her sacrifice of tears by weeping over 
her pinched flesh and sucking her thumb. The big wet eyes 
and the thumb in mouth gave her such a peculiar childish¬ 
ness that Doctor Ketelkas and Dolly both laughed. 

“You needn’t mock me!” Betty stormed. “You’d better 
make haste home and take care of that poor little girl.” 

She had no sooner ordered the doctor to go than she made 
him stay. She grew threatening in her tone: 

“Your lady could hit me in the nose with her door, but 
she might not feel so haughty if I told her what I know 
of you and where you spend your time while patients suffer. 
I knew well enough where to find you and I came straight 
here to Mrs. Beadlestone’s. 

“Mrs. Beadlestone! She was a ‘Mrs.’ once and you have 
a wife and a home. Yet I find you two here together. Well, 
why should you have a home and a handle to your name and 
me none ? 

“I want a home. I’m going to have a home—and you 
two are going to get it for me!” 

Her tears had stopped short on the lids of her brighten¬ 
ing eyes like big drops on the edges of leaves when the April 
sun sweeps the rain from the air. 

She would not let the doctor go until she had bullied him 
into consenting to her scheme. Dolly needed little intimida¬ 
tion. She was ready for anything a bit crooked. 

Betty forgot her anxiety for the little girl in her eager¬ 
ness to unfold her plot. By the time Doctor Ketelkas 
reached his house the child had cried herself to sleep and 
nature was at work upon her like a skillful nurse. 

And so it came about that when Stephen Jumel returned 
from Providence he found the gig of Doctor Ketelkas in 
front of his door. He knew it well and his heart bounded 
with fear. He felt a sharp terror and a bitter remorse as 
he hurried up the steps. 

The knocker on the door was swaddled and his valet, Albin 
Bernard, was waiting for him. 


196 the golden ladder 

“Mees Browne, w’at has she?” Jumel demanded, and 
would not wait for an answer, but rushed to the stairway. 
At the head of it stood Dolly Beadlestone with a look of 
anguish in her eyes. And she wrung her hands as if she 
were distraught. 

As Jumel stumbled on the steps, she put her finger to 
her lips imploringly, and when he reached the head of the 
stairs she fell on his neck and kissed him, murmuring, “Oh, 
Stephen, Stephen!” 

Her only answer to his whispered demands was to shake 
her head and lead him to the chamber where Betty lay in 
bed, pale as the sheer linen and already composed for death. 

To be in the fashion, or “stylish,” as the new phrase was 
now, she had recently cropped her blond hair close that 
she might wear a powdered wig. The very children were 
wearing wigs and paying as high as five dollars apiece for 
them. But they saved the price almost in the cost of hair¬ 
pins and scorching irons. 

As Betty's head lay on the pillow, robbed of its great 
white burden of false hair, her little skull in a cap of short 
bright curls looked pitifully young. For death to blight 
this pale flower would be mere wantonness. 

Jumel looked from the white invalid to the slave girl, 
Phyllis, whose black face was pierced by two great, 
frightened eyes. From her he turned to the physician shak¬ 
ing his head hopelessly, and he gasped: 

“ 'Alio, Ketelkas! W’at she has ?” 

Doctor Ketelkas mumbled: 

“All I can say is that you need a priest more than you 
need me. She has slipped out of my grasp.” 

“Albin! Albin! w’ere you keep yourself,” cried Jumel. 
“A priest, un pretre! Go get!” 

But before Albin could enter the room, Betty put up her 
white hand to check him on the sill. Her slim white hand 
was so heavy that she could hardly lift it. Her lips moved, 
but they could not transfer the freight of her last words to 
the air. 

Jumel bent lower and lower until he had sunk to his knees 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


197 


and laid his ear against her mouth before he could make 
out what her departing ghost was whispering brokenly, with 
long deaths between the phrases : 

“Stephen, my dear, no priest would—would come to this 
house—if he knew—if he knew that I—am not your wife— 
not your wife. Everybody—knows that. So let me die— 
and burn—forever. I have been wicked—but I—loved you 
—and you loved me—didn’t you— n’est-ce pas , mon ami?” 

Her still small voice was already trailing across her grave 
like a wisp of light. The touch of her lips on his cheek was 
soft and tender; her final sigh of farewell was a far off: 

“Adieu! adieu!” 

It was more than Jumel could bear. He could not see 
this lamb dragged from the fold by the wolf of death. He 
flung his arms about her to detain her and kissed her with 
a rude frenzy, and called to her to come back, he would not 
let her go, he loved her. 

Then the tears gushed through her long eyelashes and she 
found strength to babble: 

“Hold me tight. I am afraid of the flames. Don’t let 
them bum my poor body forever. I’m afraid to die, all 
wicked and lost, here in your house where I have no right 
to be.” 

Then Tumel lifted his hand and bellowed like a defiant 
bull: 

“How to marry her before she dies? Tell me! Who 
marries us queeckest? Tell me!” 

Doctor Ketelkas leaned down and said: 

“There might be some trouble getting a priest to come. 
But I know a minister who—he is right near at hand. I 
could get him.” 

“Go get!” thundered Jumel. “No, you stay to help that 
poor girl. Albin goes gets.” 

The valet, watching all this with the contempt of a critic 
for a crude farce, stepped forward to protest, but Jumel’s 
arm went out in a broadsword gesture and fairly swept him 
away. 

Dolly Beadlestone checked him at the door and said: 


198 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

“Phyllis knows where to find the preacher/' 

Phyllis nodded and darted from the room, and Albin 
followed with a last glare of disgust. 

The divine might have been ready and waiting, he was 
so soon on the spot with his little book. He was not im¬ 
pressive, even to the eyes of Betty as she studied him 
through her crossed lashes. 

Doctor Bezeliel Peltrow was in disgrace with his church 
and in debt to many tavern-keepers, but he had not yet been 
shorn of his authority to bind souls together in holy wed¬ 
lock. Occasional hiccups broke through the sacred formulas 
and his breath was no frankincense as he mumbled the final 
words and lifted tremulous palms over the clasped hands of 
the man and wife. But the law recognized him. 

And now at last Betty was a Mrs.! 

While Jumel rose to take from his wallet a liberal re¬ 
compense for the benediction, Betty writhed luxuriously in 
her new dignity. It enveloped her like a mantle of velvet; 
pride ran through all her veins, stroked and stretched all her 
limbs with glory. 

She wanted to rise and proclaim herself as good as any 
dame in town. She wanted to order her carriage and 
promenade Broadway, distributing handbills announcing her 
coronation and denouncing her enemies. 

She was already up on one elbow when she remembered. 
As the lean hands of the parson garnered the sheaves of 
money from Jumel’s full hand, the bridegroom turned to 
wonder at Betty’s miraculous recovery. She sank back ex¬ 
hausted and turned her face into the angle of her bent arm, 
and was shaken—with sobs, as Jumel believed—with 
laughter, as Dolly and Doctor Ketelkas and Peltrow knew 
full well. 

And now Jumel was the only bewildered one there. He 
was dazed to realize that he was a husband in spite of 
himself —mari mcdgre lui. And a Protestant had slipped the 
fetters on his Catholic soul! 

There was something wrong somewhere. There was 
something in the air, in the peculiar faces of Mrs. Beadle- 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


199 


stone and the physician and the cleric. They hid real 
smiles behind their false smiles. Only Albin’s face had been 
frank and his eyes steady. There was scorn in them, and 
yet a glint of pity. 

Seeing how Betty was still agitated, Jumel dropped again 
to his knees and took her into his arms, lifted her, and 
murmured: 

“Dawn’t veep, ma p’tite, ma femme!” 

But she still kept her face from him, and he was sorely 
puzzled. He was the gull at the county fair, and, having 
been duped, he was only in the way. 

Doctor Ketelkas intervened in time to save Betty’s voluptu¬ 
ous giggles from breaking through their ambiguous re¬ 
semblance to grief. 

“The poor girl must be left alone for a while,” he said. 
“We must all withdraw and let her sleep. Go back to your 
office and leave her to me. I have some hope of her re¬ 
covery now. In any case, her soul is at peace with its 
Maker.” 

He led Jumel from the room and Dolly remained to care 
for the sufferer. 

As soon as the door was closed and the footsteps outside 
had told off the number of the stairs, Betty sat upright and, 
seizing a pillow in her arms, smothered her wild laughter 
in its depths. 

Dolly sat on the side of the bed and smiled, but did not 
laugh. Indeed, she sighed. 

“What a sweet old fool you have for a husband! A good 
man if ever one was.” 

But Betty, hearing the front door softly closed, scrambled 
from her sheets and, running to the window, gazed down 
at her husband, darted back when his anxious eyes sought 
her window, and then stood up to all her height and 
announced: 

“I am a wife! I am Mrs. Stephen Jumel! Tell my slave 
to order my carriage!” 

Dolly shook her head and reminded her that she must play 
the invalid yet awhile. She had worked upon her husband s 


200 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


sensibilities, but his tenderness would turn to fury if he 
knew that he had been cheated. 

Betty nodded. She understood. Her triumph was suf¬ 
ficient for the day. 

Barefooted and clad only in her bedgown, she marched up 
and down and across and across the room in a solitary 
parade, furnishing her own music. She made a whole pro¬ 
cession. All her selves were in line: Betsy Bowen, Miss 
Capet, Madame Delacroix, Eliza Browne and Madame 
Jumel. 

Doctor Ketelkas came up again and stood enarmed with 
Mrs. Beadlestone to watch the cavalcade go by. Below- 
stairs the valet, Albin, was telling the slave girl that the 
whole thing was a trick and that her mistress was—a word 
the slave girl did not know. But she knew the look that 
went with it and she scratched the valet’s face for him, then 
ran and barricaded herself behind the kitchen door against 
his fists and the things he threw. 

Abovestairs Betty stopped short and cried: 

“The newspapers! we must hand in a notice to the news¬ 
papers. What shall we say?” 

She hustled Mrs. Beadlestone to a table and put a goose 
quill in her hand and ordered her to write. 

Mrs. Beadlestone remembered the form that had been 
used in announcing her own ruinous marriage. She 
scratched off a paraphrase: 

On April 6th, 1804, was married Mr. Stephen Jumel, an 
opulent merchant of this city, to Miss Eliza Browne, a very 
agreeable young lady possessed of every amiable accomplish¬ 
ment and all the good qualities necessary for rendering the 
connubial state perfectly happy, with a large fortune. 

This pleased Betty mightily, though she had once seen a 
notice she liked better. She had memorized it for future 
use: 

“On such-and-such a date by the Rev. Dr. Somebody, So- 
and-so esquire to the amiable, adorable, incomparable, in- 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


201 


flexible, invincible and non-parallel of her sex, Eliza Browne, 
both of this city.” 

She offered this as a substitute for the limping praise of 
Dolly’s text, but Mrs. Beadlestone shook her head and 
Doctor Ketelkas groaned: 

“Inflexible and invincible, perhaps, but the rest is a little 
strong. Better use Dolly’s version. It is what everybody 
publishes.” 

Betty acquiesced and bade Dolly copy the proclamation 
in a fair, round hand, and made her promise to leave it at 
the printing office of each of New York’s five newspapers. 


4 


CHAPTER XXIX 

A T his office Jumel was brooding again. Safely distant 
from the fragrance of Betty’s presence and the spell 
she cast upon his pitiful heart, he understood clearly that she 
had had her way. He had actually married her, married 
her indissolubly. 

Well, he was a good merchant; he would make the best 
of a bad bargain. In for a penny, in for a pound. There 
must be nothing cheap about the new establishment, nothing 
to hamper its success. 

He was a Catholic by inheritance and the marriage he 
had undergone lacked the necessary unction. The sacrament 
required the blessings of Holy Church. 

He set out for St. Peter’s. The Catholics in town were 
few and had not long been permitted to convene. During 
the Revolution the printing of Catholic books had been for¬ 
bidden and Catholics forbidden to become citizens. In 1783 
a priest desiring to visit some French soldiers had to cross 
the city in disguise. 

Two years later a carpenter shop in Barclay Street was 
turned into a church under the name of St. Peter’s. Father 
William O’Brien was its shepherd and Jumel made a frank 
confession of his sinful life and his not quite satisfactory 
redemption. 

Father O’Brien was convinced that it was his duty to 
solemnize the hasty pact and he consented to a proper 
wedding as soon as the bride was strong enough to appear. 

When Jumel hastened home with this, he caught Betty 
on her feet so far from the bed that she could not regain 
it in time. So she fell weakly across his arm and said: 

“My Stephen has saved my soul from hell and lifted me 
to heaven. It was only my soul that was sick. Now it is 
well and so is my body.” 


202 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


203 


When she heard that she was actually to be led up the 
aisle of a church and to be married like a Christian, she 
danced with profane delight. She caught Stephen in her 
arms and spun him round. He loved to dance and she got 
him jigging till his reason gave up his heart as a hopeless 
idiot. 

Betty promised to be strong enough for the church wed¬ 
ding as soon as she had the support of a new wedding gown 
and a few dozen other things. She was out wedding¬ 
shopping the next morning. 

The gown she chose was of a color as shifting as her 
soul, of an iridescent hue called “pigeon-throat.” Her hair, 
or rather her wig, was arranged in the one-sided manner 
which was going to be the rage next year. Everything was 
to be lopsided. The top of one boot was folded over to re¬ 
veal the lining of fur, and through the thin skirt it could be 
seen that one of her garters was fastened with a ribbon and 
one with a buckle. In compensation, her breast was not 
hidden by the usual loose linen kerchief so tempting to the 
exploring male, but was modestly clad. In fact her gown 
reached to her ears. A double ruff of two lace falls en¬ 
veloped her long throat. She was indeed a “tonish” bride, 
and Monsieur Jumel had cause to be proud of his merchan¬ 
dise. 

No saint could have bowed a demurer head *or worn a 
mien of snowier innocence than Betty before the altar. Her 
heart beat till it seemed to shake the pigeon-throated bodice. 

Her eyes gleamed as she looked at the marriage certificate 
and she hardly recognized herself or her husband in their 
Latin disguise as “Stephanus Jumell” and “Elizabethum 
Browne.” 

The sky was full of April rain, and when she reached the 
church door on the way out she thrust her satin boots into 
a pair of bride’s pattens of brocade and leather. They 
added only two inches to her height, yet her head seemed 
to touch the clouds. 

The French consul, who was present, congratulated Jumel 
upon his prize and rode from the church to the wedding 




204 THE golden ladder 

breakfast with a few other friends. £lie Laloi was also a 
guest, his old suit rusty with the dust of ancient books. He 
looked at Betty with a dumb reproachfulness that made her 
wince. 

To complete his wife’s detachment from her old estate, 
Jumel did not take her back to the house in Whitehall Street, 
but to a new home in Bowling Green, where he had installed 
a body of West Indian servants who were not aware that 
bride and groom had ever dwelt under the same roof before. 
At least, they pretended ignorance, for it is unlikely that 
either Albin or Phyllis could have kept so grave a secret 
dark. Or if they did, they were the only people in town 
who did. 

Betty was wedded, indeed—twice! But even the double 
ceremony was not sufficient to her success. 

As was the custom, the bride and groom remained at home 
for a few “seeing company” days. But no company was 
to be seen, except a few ribald friends of whose society 
Betty had long since tired. Jumel gave up waiting and 
returned to his busy warehouse, Betty to her restless dis¬ 
content. 

Like to-morrow, happiness was always about to come and 
never came. 

The golden ladder Betty clomb was proving but a wooden 
tread-mill. The moment one rung was trodden backward, 
another was under foot, and she was no more forward. 

Of if she were forward it was but in the matter of time 
and age and fatigue. She decided that human beings were 
mere burdened jackasses teased up the rough hill of life by 
the thistles of hope dangled on a pole stretched out between 
the long ears. They had to carry not only the load, but 
the pole, and the thistles as well, forever out of reach. 

Old friends fell away from Betty, with no new ones to 
replace them. Jumel did not approve of Mrs. Dolly Beadle- 
stone and her cavalier, Doctor Ketelkas. He may have 
suspected that they had taken some dark part in the mystery 
of his unexpected marriage. In any case, their manners did 
not comport with his ideas of a regulated establishment. 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


205 

They soon felt his hostility, not so much in any overt dis¬ 
courtesy as in a certain withdrawal of warmth. A cloud 
crept over the bright sun of his hospitality. That was enough 
to chill them out of his company. 

One evening as Betty and Jumel sat in the stupor of a 
lonely couple in a waning honeymoon, Jumel spoke up sud¬ 
denly and made her start: 

“Llie Laloi—is it you have seed him? He comes to visit 
ever, no?” 

Betty shook her head and was puzzled to realize that her 
stanchest friend had been missing since the ceremony at the 
church. She wondered increasingly. A fleet intuition made 
her suspect a reason, a twisted yet a plausible reason. 

The next day, under the pretext of looking for some¬ 
thing to read, she drove to Laloi’s bookshop. Several ladies 
were examining the latest French books, seeking for the 
printed expression of thoughts and deeds they thought and 
did, but dared not mention and could not find mentioned 
in the more prudish English. 

At sight of Betty these careful ladies scurried out of the 
shop without waiting to buy, and Laloi came forward to 
see what figure of plague had started the panic. He con¬ 
fronted Betty with a look of stupefied embarrassment. The 
hand she seized was limp in her clench: 

“How you do, Llise—madame?” he said. 

In the fashionable words that Betty had heard great ladies 
use, she exclaimed: 

“Good God ! What has happened, Llie ?” 

“No thing heppens by me but sell books. You are great 
lady now, married, fine house—bride and hosband wish not 
to be deestoorb by strangers.” 

She would not release the craven fingers he tried to 
extricate from her anxious palms. She pleaded: 

“Llie, that is not the reason. You know Stephen loves 
you like a brother. And me, too. You know we have no 
honeymoon. Tell me the truth.” 

He shook his head and evaded her gaze as if he were 
the criminal, but she crowded him against a toppling wall 


206 the golden ladder 

of old books and made him confess. At length, with the 
ferocity of a rabbit at bay, he said: 

“It is ’ard for me to say; I ’ave not the right. But if 
you must know w’at I theenk, I tell. Llise, w’en you are 
yourself I love you. You are yourself, true, real. Peerhaps 
you are not w’at is call good gerl, but you are honest bad 
gerl. You and my frien’ Stephen like each awther; you 
leeve by ’im, make ’im ’appy, laugh, dance, dreenk wine, 
ride carriage; no more weecked as a rose who blooms and 
is beautifool. You want to be wife, but Stephen say No. 

“All at once, you make like you seeck. You make Stephen 
afraid. He tells me you goin’ die and you afraid go to 
’ell. But you not seeck. You never afraid of to go to 
’ell. No, Llise. You don’t believe in no ’ell for you— 
but only one ’ell—not to be a great lady in thees town. 
You lie to Stephen. You lie to me. You lie to averybody. 
And for w’at? to be respeckable ! 

“It is nice for gerl to marry man she loves; but you didn’ 
love Stephen for marry. You cheat poor Stephen; you play 
trick on his kind love of you. It is tarrible for gerl to 
cheat or to steal for money or food or nice time or fine 
dress. But to cheat, to lie, to steal for get married and be 
respeckable—oh, Llise, it seem to me mos’ ’orrible thing ever 
I did know. 

“To go to ’ell becose you are honest bad gerl and wish to 
be ’appy—I don’ care. But to get into paradeese like boorg- 
lar, to be respeckable ’ypocrite is the mos’ ugly sinner a 
sinner can be. 

“I don’ like you any more, Llise. I cannot look at poor 
Stephen. I am so sorwy for him. Forgeeve me, Llise, but 
I cannot like you any more.” 

She was overthrown completely. Her pride was like a 
cup on the floor, spilled, shattered, trodden. She could not 
even ask for mercy. His fantastic reasons were so woman¬ 
like that she could only yield to them in abject submission. 
She agreed with Laloi that a splendid criminal or a reckless 
wanton has some excuse, but a groveling sycophantic snob, 
none. 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


207 

She went from the shop, whipped as she had never been, 
and rode away with her head down, and her heart a Dead 
Sea apple. 

Betty was lonelier than ever in her new house. She was 
neither fish nor fowl. She had cast off her old friends and 
found no new. She had what they called “the horribles.” 

instead of conquering the town in her new quality of wife, 
she found, to her stupefaction, that she had only enraged 
it. She was farther than ever from acceptance. 

It had been bad enough for an insolent Frenchman to 
flaunt her in a carriage while good women walked the streets 
like bad women. But to give the creature the name of 
wife, to set her up in a sumptuous mansion in Bowling 
Green—that was too, too much! 

Betty was so dearly the town-hate now that people began 
to call the insolent Frenchman a poor fool, the innocent 
victim of an insatiable woman’s trickery. The story of the 
pretended illness leaked out. Albin, perhaps, set it going 
among the other valets and they whispered it to the maids, 
and they to the mistresses. Phyllis doubtless launched it 
among the slaves. 

At length, and last of all, Betty herself heard the story 
as gossip had improved it. She was furious and laid the 
blame at once on Albin, insisted upon his discharge, and 
selected in his place a handsome lad named Henri Nodine 
for Jumel’s valet. Betty also accused her slave-wench of 
spreading the story, but could not discharge her slave. She 
could only beat her. 

Still the tale ran wild, like a plague, like the yellow fever 
which had raged so fiercely the summer before that almost 
half the populace fled from the town. It was then that 
Burr wrote to a friend: “We die reasonably fast. Mrs. 
Jones died last night; but then Mrs. Smith had twins this 
morning; so the account is evened.” 

And now all unwittingly Burr came to Betty’s rescue. 
He saved her from the wrath of the people by drawing all 
the lightnings upon himself. 


CHAPTER XXX 


T HE wedding had taken place in the midst of a fiercely 
contested election. Vice-President Burr was running 
for Governor of New York. Alexander Hamilton was 
frantically opposing him with every political wile and every 
denunciation. His editor, Cheetham, turned upon Burr the 
full strain of his genius for abuse. 

Burr wrote Theodosia about the “new and amusing libels,” 
and as usual disdained to answer. Later he wrote her, “The 
election is lost by a great majority; so much the better.” 

But the smile of courage in the face of defeat is a heavy 
strain upon the heart. Burr seemed to have tired suddenly 
of Hamilton’s unwearying contempt. And when he heard 
that Hamilton had not only referred to him as a dangerous 
man not to be trusted with government, but had expressed 
“a still more despicable opinion” he wrote a little note to 
his fellow lawyer ending: 

You must perceive, sir, the necessity of a prompt and unquali¬ 
fied acknowledgment or denial of the expression. 


Hamilton answered three days later with a long evasion. 
Burr retorted fiercely: 

I regret to find nothing of that sincerity and delicacy which 
you profess to value. Political opposition can never absolve 
gentlemen from the necessity of a rigid adherence to the laws 
of honor and the rules of decorum. I neither claim such 
privilege nor indulge it in others. 


Dissatisfied with Hamilton’s further tactics, Burr 
declared: 


208 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 209 

A. Burr, far from conceiving that rivalship authorizes a 
latitude not otherwise justifiable, always feels a greater delicacy 
in such cases, and would think it meanness to speak of a rival 
but in terms of respect: to do justice to his merits: to be silent 
of his foibles. Mr. Hamilton’s name has been lent to the 
support of base slanders he has never had the generosity, the 
magnanimity, or the candor to contradict or disavow. Burr, 
having exercised forbearance until it approached to humiliation 
. . . is obliged to conclude that there is, on the part of Mr. 
Hamilton, a settled and implacable malevolence. . . . Burr is 
incapable of revenge, still less is he capable of imitating the 
conduct of Mr. Hamilton by committing secret depredations on 
his fame and character. But these things must have an end. 

The correspondence and the conferences went on in 
melancholy grandeur for weeks, while the fatal meeting 
loomed more and more inevitable. 

Hamilton tried his cases, and kept his secret from his 
wife and his seven children at “The Grange.” Burr at 
Richmond Hill gave a birthday party in honor of the 
absent Theodosia, set her portrait in her chair and, as he 
wrote her, “laughed an hour, and danced an hour, and drank 
your health.” 

On the fourth of July, at the banquet of the Cincinnati, 
Hamilton was urged to sing “The Drum” and reluctantly 
consented. Burr, sitting near, gazed up and listened politely 
while the little giant chanted his swan song. 

On the eve of the duel both men sat writing their wills 
and their farewells to the world. Hamilton confessed that 
his duty to his religion, his family, and his creditors forbade 
the step he took. He wrote that he was conscious of no 
ill-feeling, though “it is possible that I may have injured 
Colonel Burr.” He promised himself to throw away his 
first fire and perhaps even to reserve his second. But he 
saw no way to avoid the fight and retain his public 
usefulness. 

Burr, in his lonely room, was writing to his daughter, 
urging her to burn any of his letters that might injure any 
person if made public. His very pen was fond as it wrote: 


210 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


I am indebted to you, my dearest Theodosia, for a very great 
portion of the happiness which I have enjoyed in this life. You 
have completely satisfied all that my heart and affections had 
hoped or even wished. Let your son have occasion to be proud 
that he had a mother. Adieu. Adieu. 

To her husband he wrote: 

If it should be my lot to fall, yet I shall live in you and your 
son. I commit to you all that is most dear to me—my reputation 
and my daughter. 

He added a gallant postscript: 

If you can pardon and indulge a folly, I would suggest that 

Madame-, too well known under the name of Leonora, has 

claims on my recollection. She is now with her husband at 
St. Jago, of Cuba. 

These would have been his last written words if it had 
been fate’s intention that he and not Hamilton should be 
granted the all-hallowing crown of martyrdom. 

But when the next morning’s sunrise brought Hamilton 
to the very spot in Weehawken where his young son had 
died in a yet more frivolous combat, Hamilton was already 
elected for sanctity. He chose wisely and, like his son, did 
not even fire at his enemy. The bullet from Burr’s pistol 
lifted him to his toes and flung him forward on his face. 

Burr’s seconds hid him behind an umbrella and hurried 
him to his skiff. Hamilton’s friends carried him to his 
boat, where Doctor Hosack worked in vain upon his shat¬ 
tered flesh while the oars fought the broad Hudson and the 
dying genius took thought of others: “Take care of that 
pistol: it is undischarged and still cocked; it may go off 
and do harm. . , . Let Mrs. Hamilton be immediately sent 
for: let the event be gradually broke to her, but give her 
hopes.” 

Mrs. Betty Jumel, riding out shopping that morning, 
passed the Tontine Coffee House and found the street so 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 211 

thronged that her dancing horses could hardly get through. 
Standing up in her carriage, she could read on the bulletin 
board a placard: 

General Hamilton was shot by Colonel Burr this morning 
in a duel. The General is said to be mortally wounded. 

Her heart was one with the public heart. This was not 
a duel, but an assassination. The vile Vice-President of the 
United States had foully done to death the innocent, the 
perfect patriot from the West Indies. 

All the bitternesses of election feuds were forgotten. 
The whole town waited in agony for the last thirty-one hours 
of Hamilton’s life, and ached with every imagined twinge. 
When death at last closed his eyes upon his seven children 
and his heartbroken wife the nation was his family and 
demanded revenge. The bar went into mourning for six 
weeks. The shops and counting-houses shut their doors. 
The funeral parade aligned all the important men of the 
town, especially the late friends of Burr. For two hours 
the cannon in the park and the Battery thudded every minute 
and two British ships and two French replied. 

After the mourning came the clamor for vengeance. The 
coroner’s jury announced that the Vice-President was guilty 
of murder and his seconds were accessories. The grand 
jury found an indictment. Burr and his seconds fled. 

In slaying Hamilton, Burr slew the duel. It ceased to be 
a fashionable ordeal, “an imperious custom,” as a preacher 
called it, who cried out against the scene of so much 
slaughter, “Ah, ye tragic shores of Hoboken! crimsoned 
with the richest blood, I tremble at the crimes you record 
against us, the annual register of murders which you keep 
and send up to God.” This Reverend Doctor Nott had 
even the Christlike heart to feel mercy for Burr, “Stained 
with blood as he is, if he be penitent I forgive him: and if 
he be not, before these altars, where all of us appear as 
suppliants, I wish not to excite your vengeance, but rather, in 


212 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 

behalf of an object rendered wretched and pitiable by crime, 
to wake your prayers.” 

There were not many voices of such gentleness. The 
nation’s prayers went forth for the life of Burr. 

For eleven days he had watched the growing rage of the 
people from his home at Richmond Hill. Then he slipped 
away in a barge down the Hudson to Perth Amboy, where 
he took a dish of good coffee, expressed his immense regret 
for the deed, and rode away in a carriage to Philadelphia. 
Thence he went south to the coast of Georgia, and made his 
way to Theodosia after a voyage of four hundred miles in 
a canoe. 

Theodosia, to whom he was always a god, welcomed him 
passionately and she and her husband kept him in a realm 
of love for ten days. Then he set forth to resume his place 
as president of the Senate in the brand-new city of 
Washington. 

Virginia received him as a hero, while New Jersey and 
New York indicted him for murder. Burr wrote his 
Theodosia of this “contention of a very singular nature 
between the two states. The subject in dispute is which 
shall have the honor of hanging the Vice-President. You 
shall have due notice of time and place.” 

But he was not molested at the capital. The Senate 
treated him with respect, and when he delivered a farewell 
address of exquisite dignity the whole Senate wept and was 
unmanned. 

But he walked out into a wilderness. His home at Rich¬ 
mond Hill had been knocked down for twenty-five thousand 
dollars, and the sum applied to his debts, leaving eight thou¬ 
sand dollars yet to pay and the debtors’ prison yawning for 
what the murder trial should leave of him. Branded like 
another Arnold, he did not repine, but turned his eyes to the 
South, with the magnificent dream of founding a new empire. 

In the shadow of grief for Hamilton and hatred for Burr, 
Betty’s little sins were forgotten. She ceased to be either 
ridiculed or dreaded. 

And when she dared to call upon the Widow Hamilton she 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


213 


was admitted. Whether her past was forgotten or simply 
deemed of no importance in the presence of such tragedy, 
no one cast a stone at her. 

And Mrs. Hamilton accepted her words of sympathy with 
a sad smile of thanks. 

Betty rode away in a mood of elation. She was a member 
of respectable society at last. She had left her card upon 
the great Mrs. Hamilton, and perhaps her call would be 
returned some day not too far off. 

On her way home, her glance, sweeping the passers-by 
with new assurance, discovered a maid-of-all-work loiter¬ 
ing on a stoop with idle broom, gossiping with some man 
whose back was to the street. 

As Betty’s eyes turned from such lowly cattle, they were 
caught by a memory. Could that be ?—it was !—Lavinia 
Ballou, the talkative half-sister who came from Providence 
on the Swift sure and brought along the hateful secret that 
Betty had planned to leave behind. 

Lavinia had told it to Captain Delacroix and undone all 
of Betty’s labor to pass herself off as an innocent. Captain 
Delacroix had made little of the matter, but Monsieur Jumel 
was of a different sort. 

Betty had hoped that Lavinia had died or left the town. 
But here she was with her tongue clacking as usual. . 

Betty had an intuition that Vinny was still blabbing that 
secret. What else was there of importance for her to talk 
about? Lavinia’s eyes caught Betty’s and lighted with the 
fiendish joy of an insult euse reviling an aristocrat on her way 
to the guillotine. 

The man with Lavinia turned to see what lit her eyes so 
fiercely, and his own eyes flared as he caught Betty’s look 
of terror. The man was Jumel’s new valet, Nodine. 

Betty wanted to swoon out of her carriage, but she put 
such a strain upon her muscles to keep her head up that 
they almost broke her neck. 


CHAPTER XXXI 


W HILE Betty had gained great heights by deception, 
the inconveniences seemed to increase with the alti¬ 
tude. The higher she went the dizzier she grew, and the 
more dreadful a fall would be. 

Lying was hard enough to carry on if one lied alone, but 
one had to count upon so much collaboration not only from 
stupid friends, but even from enemies who could hardly 
be expected to commit a sin in one’s behalf, especially when 
a virtuous act would be so much more destructive. 

To be in the power of Lavinia Ballou, of all people! that 
sniveling, canting, proper thing! Lavinia was virtuous now. 
She was simply choked up with virtue. It was like the cold 
in her head she always had. And she had a worse cold in 
her heart. 

And what had her virtue won for Lavinia? Nothing but 
the privilege of sweeping somebody’s dirty steps. And yet 
with a glance of her codfish eyes she could make Betty 
shiver in her carriage, the carriage she had earned by years 
of hard vice and laborious trickery. 

Betty had planned to go to a bull-baiting that afternoon 
in case Mrs. Alexander Hamilton should decline to accept 
her condolences. When she came from the widow’s charm¬ 
ing presence she had already decided that bull-baiting was 
a vulgar pastime, almost more unfair than dueling, since 
the poor bull had no choice in the matter and must fight 
whether he would or no. 

Only a week before, Betty had been almost sickened by 
the spectacle. The poor bull had broken off one horn as 
he charged through the leaping hounds and could see none 
of them, with his eyes bitten and bleeding. His ears were in 
rags, too, and the tongue that drooped from his panting 

214 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


215 

mouth was almost torn off. He had given up the battle in 
spite of the howls of the spectators and the yelps of the 
dagger-toothed dogs. They had driven him out of the ring 
to be slaughtered by a more merciful butcher. 

Betty’s tastes were growing more refined. All she needed 
was a little encouragement from the well-born and she would 
carry her new-fashioned virtue to the last extreme. 

But everything conspired against her. The dogs of gossip 
kept pulling her down and barking at her. Lavinia Ballou 
was the worst hound of all. How was she to be thwarted, 
now that she had met Jumel’s valet? Such a combination of 
destroyers! 

Should Betty hurry to Jumel’s office and tell him there 
that a foul conspiracy had been hatched against her? Should 
she deny everything in advance? or try to explain it as the 
crime of another? 

How would it work to say that she had taken the blame 
of an erring sister on her own shoulders? That would 
make her out a beautiful character and throw back the 
accusation on the heads of her slanderers. 

But was it wise to answer the charges before they were 
made? 

She had lifted her hand to order her coachman to take 
her to Jumel’s shop. She brought it down again in helpless 
irresolution. 

Then a team hauling a baker’s wagon came pellmell around 
a corner and frightened the horse of a man who was taking 
it home from a blacksmith shop without even bridling it. 
The horse leaped out from under the rider and that threw 
Betty’s horse into the air. They plunged and fought each 
other and bolted down Broadway until the coachman, by 
dragging on the lines, managed to pull them over into a 
great mudhole in front of St. Paul’s Church. They stopped 
indeed, but they sank to their girths in the mud. The coach¬ 
man was tossed into the gutter and the carriage pole snapped 
in two. Betty went forward on her face and came near 
ruining her beautiful nose. 

She got to the sidewalk and walked home in a towering 


216 the golden ladder 

rage, leaving the bystanders to pull the horses out as best 
they could. 

She decided to lie in wait for Mr. Jumel and catch him 
before Nodine could tell his story. But Nodine had done 
what she should have done. He had gone to the office. 
Eager to win the favor of his master, the young fool had 
hastened to him with the news that his wife was a wanton 
once. This was no news to Jumel, yet the communication of 
Nodine presented her in an unsuspected phase. 

Jumel called Nodine a liar and threw a bottle of wine at 
his head, but he had been poisoned with suspicion. 

When he came home, Betty ran down the stairs to greet 
him with the best of her smiles. He flung off her hands and 
slapped her across the face with a look that struck like a 
pair of gloves. Then he led her into the withdrawing room, 
closed the door, and began to shout at her. If the West 
Indian servants had lacked any information, they gained it 
now from the high voice of the tormented man. 

“How you can be so bad and look so good? You are 
not good. I know it. I do not hask you to be angel. I am 
not it. But to be so bad like you—I did not know a woman 
could.” 

“What have they told you now, Mr. Jumel ?” she 
demanded. 

“You come not from Newport, but from Providence. And 
you have been ver’ bad girl in Providence. Well, you are 
yo’ng yet. And your mawther is bad womans, too. But 
bad as your mawther is, she is good to her babies, to you. 
She did love you and feed you and do somesing for you 
w’at she could. But you—you did have a little baby. You 
do not know maybe who is its fazzer. Well, it might be, 
too, and a girl be only weak and poor and bad-lucky. 

“But you did not even love your own baby! You did 
not be its nurse. You leave when baby is only few weeks 
old. You run away and forget and never go back, never 
write one letter to say, ‘How goes my baby ?’ 

“You do not know now if baby lives or is dead. I did not 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 2 iz 

know it could be a woman so crwelle —not crueile awnly but 
infame!” 

Betty flinched from the horror in his soul more than from 
his words. She had been too busy saving herself from 
poverty and discontent to ponder how inhuman her neglect 
had been. Seeing herself through other eyes, she was aghast 
at herself. Jumelwenton: 

‘‘Did I knew so much before I should never liked you. 
Marry you? Jamais, jamais! I did think you had beauty, 
but now I see you the most ugly woman in all these world. 
You did leave your baby to starve!” 

The panting Betty made one feeble parry: 

“Who told you all this?” 

“Oh, I know! I know.” 

She detected a flaw in his armor and attacked with sudden 
ferocity: 

“You know! Did you ever see this boy of mine you 
speak of? Did you ever? Have you any proofs? Have 
you? What are they? Show me your proofs!” 

Jumel gave her only a shrug of the shoulders and a 
bitter smile. 

“These boy of yours, you say. I did not say if your baby 
is boy or girl. You call him boy and you have right. Boy 
it was. You remember so much, hein?” 

Betty could have bitten her tongue out to recall the slip. 
It was more convincing than any document. She had either 
to surrender or ignore the evidence. When the soul is 
trapped in its own coils, it is more furious than ever. Betty’s 
wrath was sincere. She made a fierce onset: 

“Aha! So you take the word of any servant or any lying 
gossip who wants to destroy your home! So that’s the kind 
of a man you are. A fine husband, I declare ! Any valet’s 
word is good enough to convict your own wife. At the first 
slander you hear, you hurry home and use it to horsewhip 
the poor fool who loved you and gave her life to making 
you happy.” 

Seeing him staggered in the very moment of his victory 


218 the golden ladder 

by the unforeseen impudence of this attack from the flank, 
she hurled all her forces at him: 

“Why, you damned cowardly Frenchman, you ought to be 
killed!” * 

She was driven to the usual resort of the times, a firearm. 

She snatched from a table drawer a duelling pistol he 
kept for burglars, and had never fired. And she shrieked: 

“And I will kill you if you don’t take back all you’ve said !” 

He looked at her with profound pity. He saw her in full 
frenzy and he knew that frenzies are exhausting. He sighed 
with an appalling gentleness : 

“W’at is true, w’at is done, I cannot take back; but could 
you not take back your baby ?” 

Seeing him still not persuaded after all her storm of rage, 
she fell into a storm of tears. She became suddenly over¬ 
whelmingly sorry for herself. And Jumel felt sorry for 
her, too. 

He must have been either a god or a jackass to be so 
willing to accept any burden put upon him. It was either 
infatuation or divine afflatus that made him overlook the 
sin and the insolence of this woman. In any case, he 
reasoned thus: 

After all, if a young girl of her evil beginnings was led 
astray or driven astray and fell into the hands of a man who 
betrayed her and abandoned her—and if after long terrors 
and shames she was unburdened of a child and had not 
the courage to face the world and defy it—was she not 
rather trebly pitiable than trebly despicable ? 

If she had had the courage to rear her child, she would 
have been strong enough to avoid the fall. 

Why should one be both cursed with cowardice, and cursed 
for it? 

The poor, pretty thing! She had been damned with the 
magnetism that drew men and made them imperious. But 
how could she help that ? 

The deeper her degradation, past or present, the longer 
the reach of his divine mercy, the faster it followed to 
redeem her. 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


219 


Jumel was none of your cheap strong men who take pride 
in their contempt and feel themselves lifted up by the mere 
act of looking down upon some wretch in distress. 

Jumel could hate nothing but hate, scorn nothing but 
scorn, and despise only contempt. 

His sympathy was instant and unquestioning. He was 
your true Samaritan who picks up the fallen and carries 
them home and heals them without asking questions or con¬ 
sidering his own conveniences or engagements. 

He was of that splendid class that is so much and so- 
cheaply reviled. He was a merchant. He knew that money 
is the final essential poultice to almost every wound and he 
went forth first to get money so that he might have it at 
hand. He took no refuge in the lazy sigh: “If I were only 
ridi I would help you/’ He made himself rich and helped 
as he went along. 

There was a story they told about the town of him and 
a rival importer of spirits of almost his own name—Juhel. 
On an icy afternoon in midwinter one of Mr. Juhel’s carters 
was carrying a pipe of brandy through the streets when his 
horse slipped, broke a leg, and had to be destroyed. The 
pipe of brandy was also smashed and the carter bruised. 
Jumel, coming along, found a crowd about the wreck. This 
one said, “Poor fellow!” That one said, “What a pity!” 
Jumel took off his hat and demanded: “You pity these 
poor man, heinf How much you pity? I pity ten dollar!” 
He dropped the bill into his hat and passed it about among 
the idlers. He let none escape till the hat was full. Then 
he heaped a hundred and fifty dollars in the hands of his 
rival’s carter. 

And now he saw before him a girl at bay, a girl who had 
slipped on the ice of her way and broken her character as 
well as her reputation. He pitied her. How much? 
Enough to reimburse her for her lost prestige. Her anger at 
him he did not misconstrue. It was another proof of her 
bewilderment, her weakness, her anguish, her need of help. 

He astounded Betty by his docility. She was human 


220 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 

enough to esteem it a weakness, contemptible but convenient. 
She waited to see how far it would go. 

It took an unexpected turn, forgetting the past and 
anxiously regarding the future. Calmly accepting her as a 
liar, but not to be rebuked for that, it went forward to the 
next problem. 

‘‘These boy of yours is mine, too, yes? Ve go find and 
bring him to our home, yes ? How old he is now ?” 

Betty would not admit that he ever existed. She never 
did admit it. She flung her head in a rage: 

“I never said I had a boy. How could I say how old he 
is if I never had him?” 

“When you leave Providence ?” 

“In seventeen-ninety-four.” 

“Quatre-vingt-quatorze. He has then now ten years. A 
boy of ten years old is very good in these house. How 
you call him?” 

She tossed her head in despair of him. He answered 
for her. 

“You call him Georges Vashin’ton Boven, yes ?” 

Betty’s eyes began to rain now. The name of George 
Washington had always exerted a peculiar spell upon her. 
She remembered the little girl she had been when she ran 
along the streets of Providence to watch his carriage pass. 
She remembered the forlorn thing she was when, four years 
later, she was a mother of a big baby at her little breast. 
She had hated the father, whoever he was, for he had passed 
out of her knowledge and could give her no help. 

She had not known how to name her son. Old Mother 
Ballou, who had skillfully brought him into the world, stood 
grinning and saying, “What you going to name your lad, 
dearie?” Old Major Ballou, with goose quill dipped and 
ready, sat to inscribe the title in the only book there was 
in the house. 

There was no family Bible, but since age was the thing 
that sanctified a book, he spread open the ancient leathern 
volume left behind by some shanghaied sailor who had 
probably stolen it. The title page ran: 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


221 


First Part of the Life and Raigne of King Henrie the III 
extended to the End of the First Year of his Raigne. Written 
by J. Howard. Imprinted at London by John Wolfe and are 
to be sold at his shop in Pope’s Head Alley near to the Ex¬ 
change, 1599. 

While the Ballous waited, the girl, shaken by the tortures 
she had just endured, ransacked her mind for the name of 
some saint and could think of only one. She sobbed: 

“Call him George Washington.” 

“Very good for a first name,” said the old warrior. Major 
Ballou. “But what’s to be the last name of the brat?” 

“Mine,” sighed Betty, who had no other to offer. 

“Right!” said Major Ballou, and with much scratching 
and blotting inscribed in a bare space on a yellowed page 
this legend: 

George Washington Bowen, born of Eliza Bowen, at my 
house in town, Providence, R. I. this 9th day October 1794. 

Reuben Ballou. 

As Betty had grown stronger she had grown colder. She 
resented the existence of the child that she had not asked 
for nor selected. It was not beautiful in her eyes. Its 
squalling and sprawling lacked charm. Its necessities 
offended her. It beat and tugged upon her breast in vain. 
She put it aside with disgust. The maternal instinct was 
denied her and that was all that could be said. She was a 
mammal, but she made no pretence of the motherliness that 
most of the other mammals felt. She could not abide the 
imprisonment a mother must accept. She could not live in 
Providence and neglect the child. Therefore she must leave 
Providence. 

Mother Ballou had made no great ado about this resolu¬ 
tion. She was used to the visits of young women who dared 
not or cared not to confess themselves mothers, and who 
left their offspring with her as lightly as they left their cast¬ 
off shoes with the cobbler. 

Besides, Mother Ballou had clients among women who 


222 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


longed for children and could not get them except by pur¬ 
chase. There are cuckoos in the world that will not build 
nests for their own young, and there are catbirds that will 
rear any young they can gather beneath their wings. Betty 
was a cuckoo. She did not choose to be one. She just 
was one. 

At times she quivered with shame for her character. But 
she could not by taking thought add the cubit of motherli¬ 
ness to her stature. 

Yet she wept, remembering; wept rather for her forlorn 
self than for the cub she had whelped in spite of herself. 

Seeing her tears flowing again, Jumel felt called upon to 
complete his Samaritanism. 

“Those boy—of yours—he should be here. I go get.” 

To his stupefaction, this supreme acceptance of her past 
and all its implications won him no gratitude, but another 
tempest of protest. 

“No! No! No! Are you determined to ruin me with 
your meddling? A pretty thing it would be to inform this 
town that your wife had a baby ten years ago! I suppose 
you will want to be sending out cards next, saying that 
Monsieur and Madame Jumel having been married a ten- 
month, beg to announce the arrival of a ten-year-old son! 

“Only to-day Mrs. Hamilton said she would call upon me 
soon. She would be likely to call after this, wouldn’t she? 
No, Monsieur Jumel, you bring no George Washington 
Bowen into my house.” 

He gave up with a gesture of sad complacency: 

“To hear a child laughing in these house is a thing I 
could like.” 

She felt that she could afford to grant him a crumb. 

“If it is a child you want about the place, I’ll adopt one. 
Mrs. Alexander Hamilton and some other ladies are trying 
to start an orphan asylum. It would look well if we were 
to take one of the foundlings into our home.” 

The more she thought of this, the more Betty approved 
of the idea. It had a note of high strategy. 

But fate offered a substitute. 


CHAPTER XXXII 


LL this while the namesake of the Father of his Coun- 



try, the son of the woman who would not even mother 
her own, was dwelling in ignorance of Betty’s existence. 

He was what they dubbed a “come-by-chance,” but he had 
always called Major Reuben Ballou “father” and every¬ 
body in town believed him to be that. The old Reuben had 
risen to a captaincy and then to a majority under George 
Washington. His first wife had died and he had made liquor 
his career. Versatile Freelove Ballou took him into her 
grogshop and he married her, perhaps to pay the debts 
chalked up against him for rum. 

When Freelove gathered pretty little Betsy Bowen into her 
fold, according to one story, the fat warrior found the girl 
irresistible. There was time enough for Freelove to weary 
of reproaches before George Washington Bowen entered 
the world. 

Freelove may have had some flare of jealousy that 
frightened Betty into flight. It would have been like Betty 
to make the old soldier and the old midwife a present of the 
child for which they were both more or less responsible. 

In any case, young G. W. Bowen heard no more of his 
mother, and called Major Ballou his father. Then the major 
followed the other Revolutionary heroes into the tomb and 
there was none to prevent Freelove from throwing the boy 
out of her shop. He was apprenticed to a farmer. He ran 
away and came back to Mother Ballou’s, but she shipped him 
out of town again, this time to a farm in Smithfield. 

He knew nothing of his mother’s struggles, nothing of her 
very existence, nothing of her present dubious triumph. He 
knew only that he bore a glorious name and he resolved to 


224 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


be worthy of it. He thought so much upon it that he began 
to believe himself indeed the son of Washington. He began 
to grow to look like Washington. 

It would have quenched what little pride he had to sustain 
him among the harsh furrows in the rock-sown fields, to be 
told that he was almost anybody’s child but George’s. 

There were others, however, in Providence who knew of 
Betty’s wealth. She had not been forgotten as “the hand¬ 
somest girl in Providence.” Now she was talked of as 
“the Providence girl who married the Frenchman in New 
York and had her own carriage.” 

The fame of this high achievement reached at last even 
the starveling seven children left behind by old Jonathan 
Clarke when he married Betty’s mother and sailed south to 
die. One of these Clarke girls load followed the custom 
of the family. A year after Betty abandoned the child she 
styled George Washington, Polly Clarke brought into the 
world a daughter to whom she gave the even more dis¬ 
tinguished name of Mary. For the baby’s last name Polly 
selected “Bownes,” in honor perhaps of the child’s father. 
Polly also suffered from a lack of husbands, but she multi¬ 
plied exceedingly in spite of it. 

She and Betty had been little girls together following 
the advice of Nature, the old stepmother, and of Freelove 
Ballou, the midwife who asked no questions. 

When Polly Clarke heard that her stepsister Betty had 
found New York a profitable market place, she took packet 
thither. But she brought along her baby. 

And one fine afternoon when Betty’s carriage drew up at 
the curb before her home in Bowling Green, the West 
Indian servant who let her in informed her that she had a 
caller. This was glorious news in itself, and Betty, who 
was heartsick, for all her high head, had ridden up and 
down Broadway in aching loneliness for a pleasant smile. 
She rushed to her parlor to greet the visitor, but checked 
herself before the door to assume a proper air of calm; then 
swept in with her very most high-class expression. 

She saw a shabby little woman dandling a shabby little 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


225 

girl on her knee, and her hopes collapsed. She was so dis¬ 
appointed that her heart leaped to hear the friendly cry of 
“Betty! It’s me! Polly! Don’t you remember your old 
half-sister?” 

Better a half-sister than no sister, and at that moment 
Betty was glad of any kin to call her own. She flung her 
arms about Polly and wept and laughed with her. 

Then the little girl must be discussed, a pretty, shy thing 
of four. There was a long-vacant room for a child in Betty’s 
soul, and, though the rightful owner was dispossessed, she 
was more eager for another tenant than she realized. She 
set the baby on her knee and pressed its curls against her 
breast and felt a completeness she had never known. She 
had the stateliness of the stateliest group in art, a mother 
with a child in her lap. 

And so it seemed to Monsieur Jumel when he walked into 
his parlor unexpectedly and beheld his perplexing wife 
cuddling a baby. 

“How more beautiful you are than ever! It is how I like 
most to see you,” he cried. “Whose baby that is?” 

Betty, startled into a blush and shy with the primitive 
simplicity of motherhood, caught a light in his eyes hitherto 
unseen there, and she laughed: 

“Ours!” 

This brought Jumel forward with arms outstretched. He 
gathered the girlikin into his bosom, and she nestled there 
at ease, stroking his cheek with a tiny hand. When he 
looked up and pursed his lips she set against them a little 
mouth as soft as a violet and brought spring back into his 
life. 

He was so amazingly contented that Betty introduced her 
sister without apology. Jumel greeted her with a courtesy 
that won her heart and made her nod her head and smile 
her acquiescence when Betty announced: 

“My sister is going to give us that baby to keep.” 

To Jumel this was such an incredible generosity that he 
gasped: 

“But how you can let go such a dearling?” 


226 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

Betty laughed: “Oh, she can get another one easy 
enough!” 

Which was all too true, as time was to show. 

The upshot of the conference was that Polly went back 
to Providence with a deal of money in her purse, and Betty 
no longer rode alone in her carriage. She was accompanied 
by a little Miss Muffett known as Mary Jumel Bownes, 

The most respectable ladies looked sweetly at Betty’s car¬ 
riage now, for they could not resist the winsome child 
peering out across her muff. But the eyes did not rise to 
Betty’s face, or if they did they grew cold again. And now 
a new story prospered exceedingly: somebody guessed that 
Mary Jumel Bownes was the child of Betty and Jumel, a 
betrothal pledge. Even her charity was a scandal! 

Slowly but irresistibly Betty was frozen out of New York. 
She grew weary of riding the Broadway gantlet and of 
sitting at home alone. The Roger Morris mansion kept 
calling to her. It offered her a retreat from insult. It was 
so far away that no one would be expected to call; therefore 
callers would not be missed. 

She broached the idea again to her husband. Knowing 
his devotion to his little daughter, she emphasized the value 
to the child. The air downtown was not wholesome. The 
city was choked up with its seventy-five thousand people, 
and a population growing rapidly in spite of all that yellow 
fever and the cholera could do to keep it down. The streets 
were dangerous to play in, and bad companions abounded—• 
sooty little chimney-sweeps and muddy girls who swept the 
crossings before the feet of people who might toss them a 
penny; small thieves and wantons. The drinking water was 
bad, the pumps unclean. 

She made everything a reason for going out into the 
country, and at last Jumel capitulated. He had been buying 
lands here and there. He looked into the Rogey Morris 
mansion. The windows were broken and the weather had 
had its will of the place. 

He could not be persuaded to buy it, but he consented 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


227 

to move to a house he owned five miles out on the Bloom- 
ingdale Road in the village named after old Jacob Harsen. 

Jumel was the more willing to settle there because it was 
the nest of so many of his own people. 

Here, in a pretty Frenchy home called “Chevilly,” Marie 
Antoinette’s former lady of honor, Madame d’Auliffe, lived 
with her three little daughters. Here one might see Colonel 
de Singeron, who had commanded the Cuirassiers of the 
Guard when the mob stormed the Palace of the Tuileries. 
The Marquis de Cubieres used to ride out on his beautiful 
horse, “Monarque.” Talleyrand had limped up and down 
its portico, but was now in France, driving Napoleon into 
frenzies with his wit and his genius for being indispensable 
and unreliable. 

Baron van den Heuvel, who had been governor of 
Demarara, had built a home in the region, importing the 
bricks from Holland. The old Dutch house of the Somerin- 
dycks had been only lately abandoned by three French 
princes who taught school there. Betty had met them and 
had been polite to their titles. Americans were supposed 
to abhor titles, and French titles had been annulled by the 
Republic. Still Betty was polite to the princes, never dream¬ 
ing that one of them would one day be King of France, and 
repay her smiles with royal courtesies. 

This was that Louis-Philippe, whose royal father had 
joined the Revolution and had his head chopped off for a 
reward. Louis-Philippe had also fought in battles for the 
French Republic, only to have to flee for his life. In his 
poverty he and his brothers, the Dukes de Montpensier and 
de Beaujolais, taught school in Bloomingdale. 

Another visitor to Harsenville was the exiled General 
Moreau, winner of such mighty victories that Napoleon grew 
jealous of him as he of Napoleon. 

This Napoleon, whom nobody had heard of when Betty 
was in Paris, was now more heard of than anybody on earth. 
In the words of Louis Blanc, “He made all France one 
soldier, and himself the god of that soldier.” 

Then he had grown pompous and turned the French Re- 


228 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


public into a private empire. He was turning the other 
nations of Europe into little kingdoms on whose thrones 
he set his family and his favorites. 

But his youngest brother, Jerome Bonaparte, had wan¬ 
dered overseas to Baltimore, and there at the races had 
become infatuated with Miss Betty Patterson, whom 
Madame Recamier called “the most beautiful woman in the 
world.” Jerome was only nineteen, but he insisted upon holy 
wedlock with the belle of Baltimore. 

Her wise and wealthy father foresaw the peril of such 
a match and shipped his daughter off to Virginia. But 
Jerome followed. Betty Patterson, like most of the Ameri¬ 
can girls of her time, defied parental control. She was 
“bored” by Baltimore and said that she “would rather be 
the wife of Jerome Bonaparte for an hour than the wife of 
any other man for life.” 

So she had her way, and a bishop married her to the 
future King of Westphalia. A witness said that “all the 
clothes worn by the bride might have been put in my pocket; 
her dress was of extremely fine texture and underneath it 
she wore but one garment.” 

Napoleon, but yesterday a Corsican ragamuffin, would not 
recognize the marriage of his brother to a mere American. 
He referred to her as “that woman,” “that little girl,” “Miss 
Patterson.” He commanded the Pope to dissolve the bond. 
The Pope refused. Napoleon had it dissolved, anyway, 
and would not acknowledge the union or the child. He 
married Jerome off to the Princess Catharine of Wurtemberg 
and made him King of Westphalia. 

And that ended the romance, if not the adventures, of the 
other American Betty who married a Frenchman. Betty 
Patterson had been ingenious enough to inherit a fortune, 
instead of having to create one, as Betty Bowen had. She 
married a young kingling instead of an old merchant, but 
she was exiled from the new nobility of France as com¬ 
pletely as Betty from the new aristocracy of America. Try 
as she would, they would not let Miss Patterson enter France, 
and her baby, born in England, never saw the father even 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


222 

after Napoleon fell and dragged his dynasty off its many 
thrones. 

The fact that Jumel was only a merchant embarrassed 
the French exiles at Harsenville for only a brief while. 
They forgave him the crime of trade because his heart was 
big, his wife beautiful, and his cellar deep. 

With the foreign colony Betty achieved success. But this 
seemed not to help her with the native stock. 

In her frantic search for a good foundation she turned 
naturally to the Church. She must belong to a church. 
Not to belong to a church was to be nobody here and no¬ 
body hereafter. But which of the many churches should 
she join? 

There were the Roman Catholics, under whose roof her 
marriage had been made sacramental. But the Catholics 
were not in high social standing. They were mostly immi¬ 
grants from Ireland, increasing so fast that a new church 
to be called St. Patrick’s was building. But it was set out¬ 
side the city limits in the hilly meadows later known as Mott 
and Mulberry Streets. Only a priest or two could be found 
to hold the services. 

Besides, the Catholics were so unpopular that on a Christ¬ 
mas Eve two years after Betty’s marriage a band of rioters 
called “Highbinders” attacked St. Peter’s Church with sticks 
and stones. And on Christmas Day the mob broke many 
heads in the Irish settlement near the park. Mayor Clinton 
had to get out a proclamation to end the feud. No, St. 
Peter’s was not at all the place for an ambitious woman. 

The Dutch Reformed Church was the one for fashion¬ 
ables; and as luck would have it, Jacob Harsen had just 
built for his village a little white frame chapel with an 
umbrella-shaped cupola and had turned it over to a newly 
formed congregation. It had a stove and was candle-lighted, 
and the leaders of the singers set the pitch with a tuning 
fork—which was as near as the pious would come to a 
profane musical instrument. 

The members were few but choice—with the exception 
of the tavern-keeper, Oakley, who was debarred from com- 


230 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


munion unless he gave up the selling of liquor on the Sab¬ 
bath. He preferred to give up the church. 

Knowing the value of a good entrance, Betty inspired her 
husband to present the church with its first bell. It was 
gratefully accepted and hung under the umbrella of the 
cupola, whence for years it called across the fields to the 
neighbors to come to worship. Jumel was a Catholic, but 
the Jumel bell encouraged the Protestants for years until 
a new church was proposed and then a Captain Newson, 
envious of the Jumel prestige, offered a new bell. 

The Jumel bell had won old friends and they opposed the 
new one. It was suggested that the two bells be melted, run 
together, and recast in one. But this form of marriage was 
also opposed and Captain Newson’s bell was sold for 15 
cents a pound and the Jumel bell installed in the new cupola. 

There was almost as much of a jangle over the defection 
of Deacon Webbers, who suddenly turned Baptist and was 
regretfully suspended “until he shall manifest due repent¬ 
ance and renounce the errour he has embraced.” A few 
years later the restless soul defected from the Baptists, 
“deeply lamented his errour,” and his restoration was 
“publickly announced.” 

Doctrines and dogmas did not worry Betty’s soul. She 
wanted to get in out of the wet. She did not become a 
member of the Dutch Reformed Church, but only a 
communicant. 

But then that was all that Mrs. Alexander Hamilton was. 
And now at last Betty made a friend of her, or at least 
brought about an exchange of calls. 

Mrs. Hamilton was ardent in the building up of the first 
shelter for orphans known in New York. Betty won her by 
liberal gifts of Jumel’s money. It is an ancient and an 
honorable way of breaking into the peerage, and it helped 
Betty. 

The daughter of Phebe Kelley must have given the 
daughter of General Schuyler many an anxious moment as 
they chatted on each other’s porches. 


CHAPTER XXXIII 


M RS. HAMILTON did not want to talk of Aaron Burr, 
who had slain her husband, but it was hard to keep 
him out of the conversation. He was the Napoleon of 
America for rousing violent hatreds and violent affections. 

His indefatigable soul went about gathering hostilities and 
inviting disasters. He encountered all of life’s cruelties and 
yet, it was said, he “never knew a gloomy day nor a morose 
hour.” Like everything else that gets itself said, this was 
far from the exact truth. But it implied something of 
his indomitable eagerness for conflict with either inflamed 
men or inflammable women. 

When his destruction of Hamilton closed the East to 
him, he sought a new world, not overseas but overland. He 
plunged into the oceanic vastitude of the continent on whose 
narrow rim the American flag was established. The flag 
blew backward like a prairie fire and ran on and on until 
it met the other ocean. 

Though it was in the books that Aaron Burr and Betty 
should meet, it seemed less and less likely. Betty had never 
met him while he was in New York, and now he receded 
farther and farther from her life. As she climbed to her 
zenith, he sank to his nadir. In every depth, lower depths 
yawned for him. 

Just a few months before Betty teased Jumel into wed¬ 
lock the United States bought from France the vague realm 
known as Louisiana. 

The purchase was a surprise to everybody. The Spanish 
had held it since 1762, when they received it from France. 
Now they had to turn it back again to Napoleon. 

Jefferson felt that New Orleans was “the one spot on the 
face of the earth that the United States could not leave in the 

231 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


232 

hands of an enemy, and that whoever held it was for that 
very reason naturally and forever an enemy.” He could 
not trust New Orleans even to the France of which he was 
so fond. 

To add to the alarm, the Spanish governor as a farewell 
insult forbade American boatmen to carry to New Orleans 
the products of the Western farms and forests. 

So Jefferson, preferring a bargain to a war, offered to buy 
the island of New Orleans for two million dollars. Talley¬ 
rand, shrewd, yet not so shrewd, said that Louisiana would 
be of little use without New Orleans, so why not buy the 
whole property? He knew that England was likely to seize 
it, anyway, and anything he got for it was so much cash. 

Here was an opportunity to acquire not only a citadel, 
but an empire of nearly a million square miles, extending 
from the Gulf of Mexico to the region of Lake Superior and 
west to the Rocky Mountains—and all for a sum which 
after a little haggling boiled down to eighty million francs 
or fifteen million dollars. 

Jefferson seized the chance, closed the sale, and brought on 
himself the inevitable avalanche of abuse for nearly every 
act of every President! The Federalists shrieked that Penn 
got Pennsylvania for twenty-five thousand dollars. Maine 
cost less than ten thousand. Jefferson, the maniac, would 
pay an unthinkable sum for a wilderness. All the gold and 
silver coin in the country would not come near such a sum. 
It would take a pile of dollars three miles high. It would 
take a laborer two months to shovel the money into the eight 
hundred and sixty-six wagons necessary to carry it. 

But in spite of all the screams of dismay, the bargain was 
sealed, the land accepted, and later divided up into the ter¬ 
ritories of Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, 
Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Montana, Wyoming and 
Colorado. And now the Mississippi flowed unvexed to 
the sea. 

Aaron Burr proceeded to vex it. For the first American 
Governor of Louisiana, Jefferson appointed General Wilkin¬ 
son. Burr’s heavy heart leaped at this, since he and Wilkin- 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


233 

son had been old cronies in the war. They had trudged and 
shivered together in the bitter tragedy of Benedict Arnold’s 
winter march against Quebec. 

When General Montgomery was killed, after a night of 
fearful victory, in a daybreak of defeat, Captain Burr was at 
his side. No one was ever braver than he, and when the 
order came for a retreat that became a panic, the stripling 
“little Burr” picked up the frozen body of his general, threw 
it across his shoulders, and carried it through knee-deep 
snow, over ice and rock, down ravine and up gorge, until 
the pursuers came so close that he had to abandon it. 

For this and other proofs of devoted bravery he was 
invited to join the family of Washington. Burr, who 
despised and distrusted Benedict Arnold’s patriotism, could 
not be comfortable with Washington and did not believe in 
his military ability. Neither did Wilkinson. 

Now that Wilkinson was a kind of emperor, he invited 
Burr to come West and establish a residence in order that 
he might go East as a Congressman. 

The West was fierce against the East already, and in 
1796 had almost seceded. It irked the inhabitants to have 
a capital so far away that their Congressmen must ride for 
two months to arrive there, and then only to find a popula¬ 
tion of different creeds and interests. 

When Wilkinson’s proposal reached Burr where he lan¬ 
guished in Philadelphia, he sprang into the saddle and rode 
West so fast that it took him only nineteen days to reach 
the village of Pittsburg. There he took a Noah’s Ark with 
a fireplace in the kitchen and floated down the Ohio River 
past the hamlet of Wheeling. He paused at the island where 
the curious Irish refugee Blennerhassett had sunk forty 
thousand dollars in a house of supreme ugliness. 

Burr caught Blennerhassett in the toils of his mysterious 
dream and went on to Nashville, where he met and enchanted 
a rising young general named Andrew Jackson who had been 
somewhat smirched in a divorce case. 

On and on went Burr to the Mississippi, and down it to 
New Orleans, a teeming metropolis of nine thousand souls, 


234 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

on the sixty-seventh day of his swift journey from 
Philadelphia. 

New Orleans was a bower of love and adventure such 
as Burr delighted in. The bishop was the soul of courtesy 
and even the Ursuline nuns could not resist laughing at 
Burr’s exquisite wit. 

When he had accomplished his business, whatever it was, 
Burr bought four hundred thousand acres of land, and paid 
down five thousand dollars. Then he returned North, this 
time in no gliding barge, but in the lurching saddle. A ride 
of four hundred and fifty miles brought him to General 
Jackson again and he gained a new ally in a lawyer named 
Henry Clay. 

Just what Burr planned to do is a matter of eternal dis¬ 
agreement. But Jefferson suddenly decided that Burr 
planned to raise an army, seize Mexico from Spain, set up 
his capital in New Orleans, and take over from the United 
States all the territory west of the Alleghany Mountains. 
This would have been an empire to turn Napoleon green 
with envy. 

Once more this Vice-President of the United States 
was in peril of execution for crime; formerly for murder, 
now for treason. And now his chief prosecutor was the 
President, this very Jefferson with whom he had been tied 
for the Presidency. 

Surprised either in guilt or in a hopelessly compromised 
innocence, Burr fled through morass and fen, over mountain 
and swamp, hoping to reach a British warship at Pensacola. 
But he was taken at last in Alabama and dragged back to 
Virginia. His cell in Richmond became at once a salon. 
Visitors thronged about him, romance flourished, and the 
ladies bombarded him with messages, notes, oranges, apricots, 
cream, butter, and ice. 

His Theodosia came to be with him and brought along her 
husband. After a long and immortal trial the jury found 
that his guilt was “not proved by any evidence submitted 
to us.” Burr protested the form of the verdict, but the jury 
would not consent to alteration. 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


235 


An indictment for misdemeanor still hung- over his head, 
and the verdict in this matter was that the offense was com¬ 
mitted in Ohio, not in Virginia. 

Eight months had dragged by since his capture, and he 
was freed of legal shackles, but also of hope. The majestic 
rush of his inspiration had been checked. His ardent fol¬ 
lowers had cooled and realized the peril they ran of losing 
the glory of American citizenship. Burr was done for in 
America. 

He stole back to New York and hid there, still fearing 
arrest for the “murder” of Hamilton. 

He met his daughter secretly and exchanged clandestine 
correspondence with her, praising her letters because they 
disclosed “a selection, an energy, an aptitude in your ex¬ 
pressions, which to use the vulgar male slang, is not 
‘feminine/ ” 

And then he bade her farewell in an agony of love, and, 
sneaking down the bay, crept aboard a ship and so reached 
England. 

England was afraid of him and admitted him only when 
he made the deliciously impudent claim that, having been 
bom a British subject, he was still, according to English 
law, a British subject. Secretary of State Lord Hawkesbury 
thundered that the claim was monstrous. But the English 
were always slow at seeing American jokes and Burr was 
too good a lawyer for him. They let him alone for a while, 
but gave no encouragement to his appeal that England should 
free Mexico from the tyranny of Spain. 

He was received with curiosity by the men and a pleasant 
trepidation by the women. But he spent most of his time 
in philosophy and research with his friend Jeremy Bentham 
and the gentle Godwins. 

His diary speaks of a rendezvous with Mrs. Godwin at 
the rooms of one Charles Lamb, “a writer, and lives with 
a maiden sister, also literaire, in a fourth story.” 

In that amazing Journal of Burr’s, the man who had failed 
to outdo Napoleon succeeded in rivaling Casanova. He 
records his wanderings through England, Sweden, Germany, 


236 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

France, his battles with poverty and cold and starvation, his 
loves and flirtations with duchesses and chambermaids, with 
pretty women met in stage coaches and won at taverns. The 
diary is not indecent, as has been claimed, and it includes 
heart-wringing tales of his search for medicines to cure his 
ailing Theodosia, his hunt for toys for his grandson, the 
agony of pawning even the toys for bread, the sublime 
ridiculousness of countless strokes of bad luck, the laughing 
sublimity of his courage under them. Two volumes the 
diaries make, and it would be a secular sacrilege to try to 
condense them. 

Never has a soul played chess more pluckily against a fate 
that cheated oftener or met every move with more fiendish 
mockery. Now they would not let him into a country; now 
they would not let him out. Now he was a great man in a 
palace; now he was a quaking pauper at a pawnshop. 

Americans forgot him; all but the daughter who made him 
her idol and the countless women whose hearts became live 
coals at the memory of him. 

Even Mrs. Hamilton forgot him. If Betty thought of 
him at all, it was with the indifference one feels for the 
saints and the devils, the lucky and the unlucky that make 
up the- fog of strangers walling us in. 

Perhaps when she turned her eyes longingly on the Morris 
mansion she recalled the little colonel who wanted to swop 
his Richmond Hill for it. He had swopped his whole career 
for a wild ambition, and all his properties were lost. Only 
his debts remained, and his gallantry. 

No less obstinate than Burr was Betty; no more scrupu¬ 
lous ; yet, being a woman and the daughter of a woman, 
she had a different road to travel to a different goal. 

New York was still defiant to her. She could not help 
but feel that if she dwelt in the highest house on the island 
the town would come to her feet in spirit as in fact. 

And at last, by some unrecorded device of persistency 
or incantation, she persuaded Jumel to grant her the Roger 
Morris mansion. The owner, Parkinson, sold him the house 
and thirty-six acres of land for a little less than ten thou- 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


2 37 

sand dollars. And now Betty was the chatelaine of the 
finest home on Manhattan Island. 

It was Jumel’s nature to love and lavish and Betty’s to 
inspire gifts and accept them. The man she had hoodwinked 
into marriage squandered his wealth upon her establishment 
as if she were some princess won for a bride. Merchant 
though he was, he was a French merchant and he devoted 
his racial taste to purifying the home of all the clutter of its 
hard life as a tavern and a farmhouse. He sent to France 
for silver, for tapestries and furniture. His agents bought 
in Paris the very chairs and sofas that Marie Antoinette 
had owned, and Betty sat in the seats of royalty. 

To France Jumel sent bits of the glass from the front 
door and had the original designs reproduced and shipped 
back. He found a few tatters of the old paper still left 
upon the walls of the room where Washington had presided 
at many a court martial. It was a green paper with buck¬ 
ram panels bordered with morning-glories and bedecked with 
urns and the doves of love. He sent a piece of this to 
France and had wooden blocks made there and enough paper 
struck off to cover the walls of the whole room, though it 
cost him fifteen dollars a roll. 

To the gardens, the walls, the lawns he gave the same 
loving attention. He renewed the ancient gates and the 
gate-houses, and repainted all. The four white columns 
gleamed once more high above the plains where the Harlem 
meandered to the Hudson. 

And this entire grandeur Jumel deeded to Betty with a 
devotion that still kindles the formal document beginning: 

Whereas the said Stephen Jumel, in consideration of the love 
and affection he bears the said Eliza Brown Jumel, is desirous 
of settling on her during her actual life the property hereinafter 
described. . . . 

There must have been some unfailing grace about the said 
Eliza Brown Jumel to keep that foreigner so eager for her 
happiness. She seems to have sufficed for him, but he not 
for her. 


238 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

For a time Betty was satisfied to be and feel the queen 
of her lofty domain. Yet Broadway called her back again 
and her carriage once more patrolled the streets. But it 
never stopped before the doors of the aristocracy. Hardly 
anybody accepted a nod from her or returned her hungry 
smile. 

Sometimes, just to be admitted to a parlor, she would 
drive all the way from her mansion to Brooklyn ferry and 
risk her life on the perilous voyage to that village. Here 
dwelt the Revolutionary veteran, Colonel McCumber, and 
his lady. They moved often. They had lately dwelt in the 
navy-yard; later they went out to Brooklyn Heights. 

Crossing the river was an adventure almost equal to going 
to France. The ferries were dismal sloops and the wind 
was often boisterous, but never right. It sometimes took two 
or three hours to get across the river, and the ferrymen 
were usually so drunk that often some passenger had to 
seize the tiller and save the craft. 

Only a few years back, on a cold December afternoon, the 
besotted ferry-master capsized the boat and spilled his pas¬ 
sengers into the icy stream. 

One day when Betty was at Colonel McCumber’s she met 
a Miss Arnold from Providence. Long afterward Miss 
Arnold testified that she remembered when Betty was a 
young girl “promenading with the painted women in Provi¬ 
dence” and “taking her walks in Main Street.” 

She asked Betty if she knew Providence and Betty evaded 
her in vain. She grew confused under the cross-examina¬ 
tion and went home alarmed. 

And now she felt that her past had caught up with her. 
Doubtless everybody in New York knew that she had come 
from Providence; everybody in Providence knew that she 
had gone to New York—and prospered there exceedingly. 

She resolved to go back to her birthplace and dazzle it a 
little with her success. She made an excuse of attending 
the funeral of an old friend, and stopped at the Golden Ball 
Inn, in the best room where George Washington had rested. 

The occasion was so brief and the funeral so poorly 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


239 


attended that Betty felt called on to proclaim herself to the 
indifferent fellow citizens. So she announced that she would 
give a lecture from the piazza. 

Everything was a “lecture,” from “Hamlet” to a ban¬ 
queter’s toast. Betty’s audience consisted of nothing more 
than a hundred or two of boys. They had evidently over¬ 
heard a deal of adult comment on Betty, for as soon as she 
began to speak they began to boo and hoot. They drove 
her from the piazza and she retired in a new dismay. 

She could not conquer her own town. How could she 
make conquest of a city like New York? Yet conquer it she 
must. She had tried everything she could think of, but in 
vain. Now the gods took mercy and suggested a new step. 

The way to capture New York was to come in over the 
ocean from a foreign land—from France. Her husband’s 
ships were plying to and fro. He had already a little navy 
of his own. He was rich in New York and rich in Paris. 
He could get her access to the drawing-rooms of royalty. 
And once she came thence, New York would never dare 
deny her authority. 

There was one great and prolonged obstacle: the sea was 
boiling with war. England, endeavoring to save Europe and 
herself from Napoleon, counted all who were not for her 
against her. Napoleon adopted the same policy. 

The Americans cherished many grudges, and many grati¬ 
tudes, for both nations. They could not decide which one 
to fight, and so fought neither, though both seized American 
ships and enlisted—that is to say, enslaved—American 
citizens. 

Among the almost countless American ships seized by 
France or England were two of Jumel’s, two schooners, 
Purse and Prosper. The Purse fell in with a British man- 
of-war and was pursued so hotly that the captain threw over¬ 
board the ship’s papers and Mr. Jumel’s. To escape the 
British frigate the Purse ran into the harbor of Bayonne. 
Whereupon the French calmly seized her and sold her and 
kept the money. The Prosper furnished a similar morsel. 

And yet Jumel’s patriotism did not falter. There was 


240 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


something about Napoleon’s divine butchery that endeared 
him to his very victims. He filled the earth with carnage, 
but the sky with splendor. And every Frenchman loved and 
loves that gleam, in spite of the blood-red sunset of 
Napoleon’s day. 

For years America endured the insolence of Europe. In¬ 
stead of fighting those who were destroying American ship¬ 
ping the government forbade American ships even to leave 
port. This brought ruin to the merchants, grass to the docks, 
and rust to the anchor chains that had once been weighed 
as the prows swung out for all the world’s ports. 

But poltroonery is no more successful than bravado, and 
at last the craven administration was kicked into the War 
of 1812. 


CHAPTER XXXIV 


T O be spoken to or not to be spoken to. That is the 
question of success of a certain sort. Betty longed for 
it and could not get it. It tormented her amazingly to be 
looked through as if she were transparent; to be deprived 
of the lifted hat as if one’s passing did not matter; to be 
denied the conversation of people who, after all, were proba¬ 
bly more interesting in their stubborn silence than they would 
have been if they unloosed their chatter. 

There was one other soul in New York who was not 
spoken to by those who make it a matter of importance whom 
they speak to. This was Aaron Burr, who would, at a 
slowly approaching day, speak to Betty and add his melan¬ 
choly distinction to hers. 

As yet they were not speaking to each other. Betty re¬ 
garded Burr with interest, for she understood what it was 
to be snubbed. But she dared not express her sympathy, 
since one of Betty’s few acquaintances among the elect was 
the widow of Alexander Hamilton, who in his death had 
turned Burr into a man dead though walking. 

It did not seem to fret Aaron Burr that so many people 
snubbed him. The gods of good luck were not speaking 
to him, either; although at times they trailed before him 
some prize just for the wanton joy of snatching it away 
as he bent to pick it up. And they laughed to see him fall 
upon his nose. But he always picked himself up, if not the 
prize, and met the puerile cruelties of the gods with the grim 
demeanor of a dauntless man. 

In 1812 Aaron Burr had stolen out of Europe and stolen 
back into America. He entered Boston as Mr. Arnot, in 
disguise, thwarted, penniless, hopeless; but he feared a prison 
in America less than a death by starvation in a foreign gutter. 

241 


242 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


He had sold a few volumes on board ship for thirty-two 
dollars, had borrowed a wig and grown himself a beard. 
And he waited in hiding till he could learn from New York 
friends what fate might greet him there. It should have 
taken only five days for a letter to get to Boston and for 
an answer to return, but no word came. 

Of twenty-six remaining dollars he lent his landlady 
sixteen and a ship acquaintance ten. Both returned the 
moneys; which was more than Burr had always done or 
was likely ever to do with the enormous sums he owed. 

In his desperation, the president of Harvard University 
consented to talk with him and paid him forty dollars for 
two rare books that Burr had brought overseas. Twenty of 
these dollars went for the passage money on the sloop that 
got him to New York in nine days, just ten days before 
President Madison declared war against England. 

After skulking about New York in terror, Burr spent his 
first night in a cellar at a cost of twelve cents. Like a way¬ 
farer in a savage wilderness, he hid during, the day and 
travelled by night. A woman gave him shelter for several 
weeks while friends secretly persuaded his creditors to grant 
him a chance of life. The indictments hanging over his head 
were as withered as his old laurels. 

One day appeared a little advertisement, “Aaron Burr has 
returned to the city and resumed the practice of the law.” 
He nailed a small tin sign on the front of his lodgings and 
waited for what might come. He had ten dollars as his 
only capital aside from an infinite supply of pluck. In the 
country which had all but made him its President and all 
but hanged him for a traitor he found that hate had finally 
died of the disease so fatal to love—fatigue. 

Five hundred callers waited upon the prodigal that day. 
One of them was a lawyer whom Burr had set upon his 
feet and who now lent Burr his library. In the first fort¬ 
night Burr earned two thousand dollars. 

No wonder he wrote with cheer to his Theodosia and her 
husband and to the little grandson whose toys he had bought 
abroad and had to pawn. 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


243 

But the clouds had opened only for a moment to remind 
him how blue the sky could be, how warm the sunshine once 
had been; for there came from Theodosia a brief letter like 
a scream of anguish: 

A few miserable days past, my dear father, and your late 
letters would have gladdened my soul; and even now I rejoice 
at their contents as much as it is possible for me to rejoice at 
anything; but there is no more joy for me; the world is a blank. 
I have lost my boy, my child is gone for ever. He expired 
on the 30th of June. 

My head is not now sufficiently collected to say anything 
further. May Heaven, by other blessings, make you some 
amends for the noble grandson you have lost. 

Her husband, the Governor of South Carolina, was also 
the general of the state troops in the war now being con¬ 
ducted with an unpreparedness and inefficiency never equaled 
even in the history of the American militia system. In spite 
of his brilliant record as a soldier, Burr had no hope of being 
permitted to serve in arms; and he had only contempt for 
the ghastly unfitness of the unmilitary souls in charge of 
the rash attack on that Great Britain which was slowly 
crushing even Napoleon’s genius. 

The patriots who proposed to wrest Canada from England 
with one impetuous raid were dazed to learn that General 
Hull, after issuing a blood-curdling proclamation and cap¬ 
turing a Canadian village, fled in panic before a small force 
of Indians and Canadians, shut himself up in a fort at 
Detroit, then promptly surrendered to his amazed pursuers 
without firing a shot. 

Hull won immortal fame as perhaps the first American 
officer to surrender a fortress to an inferior number of 
troops outside, but the United States had small comfort in 
finding him guilty of cowardice and neglect of duty, for 
instead of adding Canada to our boundaries we had lost 
the whole Michigan territory. 

The news of this national humiliation reached New York 
just about the time that Burr received another long letter 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


244 

from Theodosia showing that her soul had not recovered 
even after a month of mourning. Still she cried aloud: 

Alas! my dear father, I do live, but how does it happen? 
Of what am I formed that I live, and why? Of what service 
can I be in this world, either to you or anyone else, with a 
body reduced to premature old age, and a mind enfeebled and 
bewildered? Whichever way I turn the same anguish still 
assails me. You talk of consolation. Ah! you know not what 
you have lost. I think Omnipotence could give me no equivalent 
of my boy; no, none—none. 

I wish to see you, and will leave this as soon as possible, 
though not so soon as you propose. I could not go alone by 
land, for our coachman is a great drunkard, and requires the 
presence of a master; and my husband is obliged to wait for 
a military court of inquiry, which he demanded, and is ordered 
on him. 

I have been reading your letter over again. I am not in¬ 
sensible to your affection, nor quite unworthy of it, though I 
can offer nothing in return but the love of a broken, deadened 
heart, still desirous of promoting your happiness, if possible. 
God bless you. 

Confused as his own affairs were, Burr managed to send 
a doctor from New York to Charleston to bring Theodosia 
to him. 

Whatever one may say or think of Burr—and there are 
few men on whom history and gossip have heaped more 
abuse—there is at worst the pity due him and the homage 
that one pays to a trapped and drowning rat, still swimming 
fiercely, still snapping at the wires that close about him 
as the water rises. Let the word “rat” stand for Burr; 
since Faux, an English farmer who saw him then, described 
him as “a little, lean, pale, withered, shabby-looking, decayed, 
grey-headed old gentleman.” But how worse than ratlike 
to slander him or deny him the majesty of his sufferings and 
the glory of his defiance! 

His creditors spared him while he was penniless, but the 
news of his first fees awakened their ardor. He owed appall¬ 
ing amounts; the vast expenses of his trial, moneys bor- 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 245 

rowed from the Due de Bassano and others at home and 
abroad; obligations financial and sentimental to those who 
had been involved in the golden enterprise that was to make 
him emperor of the West. And his spendthrift heart kept 
taking upon itself new charities. He gave gifts, who could 
not pay his creditors! 

Constantly before him was the horror of the debtors’ 
prison with its final shackles upon his courage and its vermin 
waiting for his body. Every bit of good luck was a mere 
delay. But still the old rat dodged and gnawed and swam. 

Then came the supreme test of his mettle. Greater than 
his faults, his misfortunes were sublime and he was equal 
to them. In the first days of 1813 he received a note from 
the physician he had sent for Theodosia, and who loved 
Burr enough to perform this service for him: 

I have engaged a passage to New-York for your daughter in 
a pilot-boat that has been out privateering, but has come in 
here, and is refitting merely to get to New-York. My only 
fears are that Governor Alston may think the mode of con¬ 
veyance too undignified, and object to it; but Mrs. Alston is 
fully bent on going. You must not be surprised to see her very 
low, feeble, and emaciated. Her complaint is an almost inces¬ 
sant nervous fever. We shall sail in about eight days. 


With all the other storms of hatred that buffeted him, Burr 
did not falter before mere blizzards of wind and snow. He 
gathered his cloak about him and faced the sleety gales that 
flogged the Battery, watching the Bay for the ship that should 
bring his lonely child to his lonely breast. 

If sails whitened the horizon, they were never the sails 
of her boat. Ships brought word of a fearful tempest that 
crashed along the whole Atlantic coast and broke across 
Cape Hatteras about the time that Theodosia’s ship should 
have passed that fatal headland. 

By and by there came by overland stage two letters from 
Governor Alston addressed to Theodosia, and one to Burr. 
To her he wrote: 


246 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

Another mail, and still no letter! I hear, too, rumours of 
a gale off Cape Hatteras the beginning of the month! The 
state of my mind is dreadful. Let no man, wretched as he 
may be, presume to think himself beyond the reach of another 
blow. I shall count the hours till noon tomorrow. If I do not 
hear then, there will be no hope till Tuesday. To feelings like 
mine, what an interval! May God grant me one word from 
you tomorrow. Adieu. All that I have left of heart is yours. 
All my prayers are for your safety and well-being. 

Forebodings! wretched, heart-rending forebodings distract 
my mind. I may no longer have a wife; and yet my impatient 
restlessness addresses her a letter. Tomorrow will be three 
weeks since our separation, and not yet one line. Gracious God! 
for what am I reserved? 

More anxiously now Burr haunted the Battery and its 
outlook toward the sea. Sails came in and brought the 
nation glorious news. In seafight after seafight the little 
American navy of twenty vessels staggered the hitherto 
invincible British fleet of six hundred sail and dimmed the 
pride of Trafalgar. 

England was still at death grapple with Napoleon and 
could spare few ships or men to rebuke the little republic 
that came to his aid with a zeal that looked to the mother 
country like heinous treason. She repealed the odious 
Orders in Council, but too late. The United States fought 
on, and in England there grew a black resentment that boded 
ill for the United States once Napoleon were done for. 

Into the harbor of New York the privateers kept coming 
with their prizes. However badly the soldiers bungled their 
affairs, the little navy of the few big ships brought home 
glory and good news. 

But the sea brought no good news to Aaron Burr of 
Theodosia. Her husband wrote: 

I have in vain endeavoured to build upon the hope of long 
passage. Thirty days are decisive. My wife is either captured 
or lost. A short time since, and the idea of capture would have 
been the source of painful, terrible apprehension; it now fur¬ 
nishes me the only ray of comfort, or rather of hope that I have. 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 247 

You may well observe that you feel severed from the human 
race. She was the last tie that bound us to the species. What 
have we left? In surviving the 30th of June I thought I could 
meet all other afflictions with ease, yet I have staggered under 
this in a manner that I am glad had not a witness. 

Yet, after all, he is a poor actor who cannot sustain his little 
hour upon the stage, be his part what it may. But the man 
who has been deemed worthy of the heart of Theodosia Burr, 
and who has felt what it was to be blessed with such a woman’s, 
will never forget his elevation. 


And these last sentences expressed Burr’s courage, too, 
and his consolation. 

To this day no man has ever heard of that ship or of any 
of its sailors or its passengers. 

A rumor went about that some of the pirates infesting 
the seas had captured the ship, and that Theodosia, her maid 
and her doctor, had been forced to walk the plank. The 
story was based on the alleged confession of a dying pirate 
who had seen a beautiful lady walk bravely out into the 
sea. 

It sounds a little like Theodosia, who had never faltered 
before the storms that assailed the father she revered. She 
was with him at his trial, and had bravery for everything 
except the death of her little child. If it was not true, 
it was well invented, that fable telling how she was blind¬ 
folded by some bungling murderer who may have kissed her 
cheek as he knotted the kerchief in her hair, and fastened 
her hands behind her. The wind would have embraced her 
and blown her draperies about her as if she were the figure¬ 
head on the prow of a ship. The sea would have welcomed 
her as she plunged into the depths. 

Whether that were her death or not, what, after all, was 
her life—what is anybody’s, but a kind of walking the plank 
blindfolded for a brief distance before the drop into oblivion? 

In any case, Theodosia had one of her wishes granted, 
one of her whims respected; when, some years before, she 
had expected death from an illness, she wrote: 


248 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

I charge you not to allow me to be stripped and washed, as is 
usual. I am pure enough thus to return to dust. Why then 
expose my person? 

The legend of the pirates was not spread till long after her 
disappearance, but Aaron Burr imagined it and every other 
fantasy that might keep his hope alive. 

Even if the Patriot had foundered in the great storm, some 
of the passengers might have taken to the lifeboats and 
floated for days. They might have been blown to some 
unvisited island and be waiting there for the horizon to be 
blessed with a sail. They might have been picked up by 
some captain outward bound and unwilling to turn back. 
They might have been carried to Singapore or Java or the 
Chinese coast, and it might take a year or two for them 
to find their way home. 

So Burr kept on hoping, kept on patrolling the Battery 
where the waves of the bay recoiled from the stout sea¬ 
walls and flung spume now and then upon the skirts of 
the ladies who stared at Burr and chattered about him 
after he had passed. 

But Burr, for once, was not eying the ladies. His gaze 
was always on the east, toward the Narrows, where all the 
ships came in as through a door from the great outward 
of the Atlantic. When a ship blew up the bay with the 
leisure of a swan, he hurried to the slip to question its 
captain. But no one ever had news of Theodosia. 


CHAPTER XXXV 


T HE war on land was an almost unrelieved catalogue 
of defeats. The capital at Washington was captured 
by British troops that landed from ships, drove before 
them superior numbers of American troops, sacked and 
burned the city, and sailed away in triumph. 

On the sea a few great American captains fought re¬ 
nowned duels, but gradually the last of them were driven 
into port and the American flag vanished from the waves. 

Then a word came from New Orleans that filled New 
York merchants with dread. They had three million dol¬ 
lars’ worth of cotton stored there, and it looked as if the 
British would easily capture the city and “wind up the 
catastrophe.” Two weeks passed with no news, and then 
three ships slid into the harbor with the radiant tidings 
that Andrew Jackson’s riflemen, hiding behind their cot¬ 
ton bales, had shot to pieces the English line and sent it 
back to its ships with the dead body of its commander. 
Jackson had saved the cotton that saved him. 

Three days later, on February 9th, an American priva¬ 
teer captured a vessel carrying a London newspaper 
dated November 28th and holding out hopes of immediate 
peace. Two days later a British ship brought home a sec¬ 
retary of the Legation in London. He told that the treaty 
was actually signed before the battle of New Orleans. It 
was a humbling treaty, but it was a treaty of peace and 
the city went mad with relief. The streets were filled with 
people carrying lighted candles and torches. 

Next day there was a rush to the idle wharves and the 
ships went forth once more to sea. Soon they came back 
with the incredible news that the colossal Napoleon, who 
had lost nearly half a million men in his Russian campaign, 

249 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


250 

had been dragged out of the sky and reduced to the dig¬ 
nity of ruler of the little island of Elba. Fat old Louis 
XVIII rolled into Paris, only to roll out again when Na¬ 
poleon came back. 

The Jumels resolved to visit the France of this uncon¬ 
querable Napoleon, and set sail in the bark Eliza on the 
1st of June. They took with them their borrowed child, 
Mary Bownes. 

While they were at sea Napoleon marched out of Paris 
into Belgium, whipped Bliicher at Ligny, broke down be¬ 
fore Wellington at Quatre-Bras, fell back on Waterloo and 
gave the name of the village to the world’s vocabulary as 
a common noun for utter defeat. 

The government of France demanded his abdication and 
invited him to retire to the United States. 

Betty and Jumel landed at Bordeaux and rode for six 
days in a cabriolet. The quarters were tight, with Mary 
Bownes sitting between them or perched on one lap or other 
all the way, chattering incessantly and asking innumerable 
questions. She counted forty-six buttons on the skirts of 
the postilion’s coat, and marveled at the boots he rode in. 
They were so enormous that they were set upright by the 
side of the postilion’s horse. He stepped into them with¬ 
out removing his shoes or gaiters, and the stirrup had to 
be a foot high to receive them. 

One of the postilions was a lad who was almost drowned 
in his boots. The horse he bestrode paid little heed to his 
kicks and cries, and the boy, for all his practice, had not 
learned to snap his whip as if it were a musket firing. At 
last he took from his pocket a knife and began to stab the 
horse’s neck till it bled. Mary Bownes screamed and Betty 
demanded that the little brute give over his cruelty. He 
obeyed, but could not understand this pother about a mere 
horse. 

In the taverns there were many quarrels. The soldiers 
of Napoleon, who adored him the more the farther they 
had been from his presence, would not abide the taking of 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


251 

his name in vain. They fought the royalist soldiers who 
came back with the king. 

And in one inn where the Jumels took their dinner at 
half past five there was an embarrassing riot. Two British 
officers, having spoken with contempt of the fallen Cor¬ 
sican, were overpowered and compelled to toss off his health 
in a vessel fetched for the purpose and usually employed for 
the very reverse of drinking. 

It was so dangerous taking sides for a while that the 
very question of money was full of risks. If you called a 
certain five-dollar gold piece a napoleon, as like as not the 
tradesman would fling it back at you as a louis d’or. If you 
called it a louis, you were rebuked with napoleon. The trou¬ 
ble-fleeing Jumel preferred to call it a piece de vingt francs> 
which offended nobody. 

For one thing, most of the French believed that the 
Little Corporal would come back to power again. Had he 
not returned from Elba? Where could they put him and 
keep him, so long as they did not put him to death? And 
even then his ghost would return. As return it did. 

Louis XVIII was only le roi. They called him the “Oys¬ 
ter King,” punningly changing his numeral dix-huit to des 
huitres. Napoleon was forever Vempereur. The very title 
resounded with a thrill of drums. 

When Betty reached Paris at last, she found it quite an¬ 
other Paris from the one she had known when she came 
thither in the days of the White Terror. There had been 
no Napoleon then. Now he was everywhere. Even the 
buildings long antedating him seemed to have been built by 
him, for he had had their grime of years scraped off and 
their walls redecked with his letter “N.” And his symbolic 
bees swarmed on all the walls. 

In the Place de la Concorde the great column he had 
built of the captured cannon soared into the sky. The Al¬ 
lies had pulled his statue off the top on their first entry into 
Paris, and set up a white flag in its stead; but they could 
not recapture their melted guns. 

Jumel and Betty came out of the oblivion of the sea to 


252 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

find Napoleon bankrupt of every resource. This disaster 
inspired Jumel to offer the fallen Titan a free passage to 
the United States on one of his ships. His pity was great 
enough to pass the hat for a carter whose horse had slipped 
on the ice, or to lend a hand to the most unpopular monarch 
or man in the universe. 

Betty, however, was in a worse plight than ever. She had 
come to France to make use of Napoleon, and Napoleon was 
utterly useless to anyone. 

The jocose fates that tumbled the monarchs off their 
thrones and tumbled brand-new monarchs into them had 
chosen a strange minister in the little Corsican who came 
over to France and knew debt and jail and poverty, then 
glory unparalleled in human chronicle, then defeat as* illus¬ 
trious as his triumphs had been. 

It was a quaint touch that while kings and czars and 
princes waited in embarrassment to know what to do with 
the captured Napoleon and dared not accept Lord Liver¬ 
pool^ advice to turn him over to Louis XVIII to be shot or 
hanged, Betty’s husband offered him her bark, Eliza. 

She herself had come nearly as long a way as Napoleon 
since she stole out of the little town where her mother had 
walked the unpaved streets. And now she had a husband 
and wealth and ships, and she took her place with the 
mighty ones who tried to solve the dilemma of Napoleon. 

According to the legend, when Jumel called upon Na¬ 
poleon with his gift of a ship, the Emperor was so touched 
that he presented the old gentleman with his own traveling 
carriage, his army chest, and other souvenirs of his gran¬ 
deur. Later he sent the key of his army chest to Betty by 
General Bertrand. 

Even Napoleon could not have made Betty a more wel¬ 
come gift than his carriage. In thrifty haste she rode forth 
in it at once, and reveled in her triumph until she reached 
the barriere . Here the sentinels of the Allies recognized 
the Napoleonic arms and made her get down. They put her 
under arrest as a spy and she spent hours of miserable anxi¬ 
ety before word could be sent to her husband. 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


253 


Jumel hurried to the American minister and persuaded 
him to overawe the commandant of the gate and to threaten 
him with international difficulties. The officer at last re¬ 
stored the coach and the horses, and Betty rode back to 
town with undiminished front. But she was convinced that 
Napoleon’s star had set forever. She turned her eyes to¬ 
ward the throne of the eighteenth Louis. 

There were not many private vehicles in Paris, and Ma¬ 
dame Jumel was soon as familiar a figure on the boulevards 
as she was on Broadway. 

She was hardly surprised when her husband came home 
from his final interview with Napoleon and announced that 
the Emperor could not be persuaded to America. He pre¬ 
ferred to intrust his destiny to the England that had con¬ 
quered him at last. 

He expected to be ferried across the Channel and estab¬ 
lished as a country gentleman, to recuperate and hunt 
foxes until the time came for another return. But the 
British selected for his doom the little island of St. Helena 
and shipped him thither to be entombed alone, with a guard 
over the sepulcher. 

Then he vanished from France on H. M. S. Bellerophon, 
trailing a cloud of immortal splendor after him. 

What might not have happened if he had listened to the 
prayers of Jumel?—the all-pitying Jumel who urged the 
friendless Napoleon to come to America and start life all 
over again. That was what Jumel had done when “the black 
Napoleon” drove him out of San Domingo. He had taken 
refuge on that very islet of St. Helena and tarried there 
a year before he made his way to New York and new for¬ 
tune. 

If Napoleon had come to this America whither so many 
other European giants almost came, he might have devised 
another empire and succeeded where Aaron Burr, his imi¬ 
tator, had almost succeeded. But Napoleon was tired. He 
had made of France a sledge and beaten Europe upon his 
anvil to his will until the handle splintered in his grip. He 


254 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

was weary and he refused the hospitality of Jumel and 
Betty. 

Other Bonapartes took refuge in America. Brother 
Joseph became a neighbor of Betty’s and almost rented her 
mansion. Four of Brother Lucien’s sons came over and 
Lucien Murat married an American woman who lost her 
money and taught school to keep him in food until he should 
return to France as a peer. 

But The Bonaparte was as finished as Troy. The magic 
of his name, however, hovered like a spell, and the fame of 
the Jumel offer spread among the worshipers of the de¬ 
parted god. 

For their home in Paris the Jumels chose no less a place 
than the Hotel de Berteuil in the Rue de Rivoli. It was at 
a fashionable address and well servanted, though it embar¬ 
rassed even Betty to have a male valet make her bed. 

When she went to the theater and listened to Racine, Cor¬ 
neille, Voltaire, she heard rather the music of the stately 
declamation than the noble words. She noted that certain 
lines brought thunders of applause from the Bourbons, while 
the Bonapartists sat glum. At other lines the Bonapartists 
leaped to life and the Bourbons, subsided. Betty applauded 
in both cases, to make sure of pleasing both factions. 

The city was aswarm with foreign uniforms. The 
Champs-Llysees was full of English tents. The long¬ 
haired Prussians thronged the Cafe Montansier or played 
faro at Robert’s. The vandals were stripping the Louvre 
of its captured works of art. 

In the neighborhood of the Palais Royal life was at its 
maddest. Museums of art, libraries, gambling halls, and 
dancing resorts were jumbled together. Generals, philoso¬ 
phers and Cyprians were mixed with dogs that danced, edu¬ 
cated hogs, canary birds that drilled, Hindu jugglers, her¬ 
maphrodites, giants, Javanese serpents, Egyptian crocodiles. 
The British soldiers had few quarrels with the natives, but 
they had to keep the Prussians and the French from inces¬ 
sant mutual murder. 

The street life fascinated Betty. She had a trace of the 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


255 

street still in her soul. But ambition was gradually smoth¬ 
ering her last gypsy strain. She grew mercenary with the 
years. She could not even love without computing the 
profit and the risk. 

She was like the pretty girl Celine who wandered the 
cafes selling trinkets. Celine was a Parisian institution and 
many a man put out his hand to pinch her cheek or beg a 
kiss. But she always retorted, “Buy something!” She 
would stand and barter jokes, but an amorous advance was 
always checked with a cold, “Achetez quelque chose!” 

Betty’s once so promiscuous heart was growing miserly, 
too. But she no longer thought the thoughts of the Celine 
she had once been. She strutted now among the great and 
pretended that she was born on their soil. 

She was to be found at many a conversazione, where the 
program included a dance, a concert, or a little play. She 
gambled a little and grew expert at throwing the dice in 
the hilarious game of creps. But even her dissipations were 
fashionable. 

The American colony in Paris was large and brilliant, 
but Betty was omitted from its invitation lists. Now and 
then she was surprised to see from her carriage some New 
York woman who had snubbed her on Broadway snubbing 
her on the Rue de Rivoli. 

But Betty could endure this the better now, from the 
fact that she did not have to ride alone in Paris. Some emi¬ 
nent peer or peeress was usually glad of a lift. 

Betty literally rode into the French court in her carriage. 
She bribed her way by lending it to the magnificent ladies 
who had resumed their ancient prides without recovering 
the funds that had been expropriated. 

Betty, the little pavement-trotter whom the little city of 
Providence had farmed out as a young girl, and hooted 
out when she reappeared as a rich woman; the wanderer 
of five names whom New York would not accept, for all 
her money and her carriages, found welcome in both the 
royal courts of France. 

She drove carefully. Without offending the grateful peer- 


256 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

esses of Napoleon’s creation, she won over the peeresses of 
the ancient regime. She kept a double salon; on alternate 
evenings Bonapartes and Bourbons were her Quests. To 
her doors would come begging letters from some countess 
who wanted to call on the Minister of Finance and did not 
want to go afoot. “Dear Madame Jumel. It is for to-mor¬ 
row that Mama has her appointment with Monsieur Roy. 
Would you kindly let her have your carriage—which she 
won’t keep long.” 

If a peer died she must receive an eilgraved mortuary 
letter. When the king went to his chapel to worship she was 
permitted to join the little group of witnesses. When the 
king gave a ball, Betty danced. 

Among her friends were the Duchesses de Berri and de 
Charost, the Comte d’Alzac, and no end of others, till her 
tongue was twisted with their complex titles and her mem¬ 
ory was wrenched with trying to keep their alliances 
straight. 

The Comtesse Tascher de la Pagerie, an impoverished rel¬ 
ative of the Empress Josephine, came to live with Betty. It 
was thrilling to have a comtesse dwelling with one like a 
poor relation. It was glorious to extend charity to duch¬ 
esses. 

It was through this comtesse, who lived for years on the 
bounty of the Jumels, that Betty finally obtained the chance 
to acquire the jewels of Napoleon and Josephine. She made 
her husband pay twenty-five thousand dollars for them, and 
they were cheap at the price, considering that they included 
the wreath of sapphires woven by the best goldsmiths for 
the little Napoleon to set on Josephine’s high head when he 
made her empress. The crown may have been, as Beer has 
said, “hellish ugly,” but it was beautified by its tragic re¬ 
nown; for Josephine was divorced, dethroned and dead, 
and Napoleon was moping like a crippled eagle on a crag 
he could not leave. 

Betty reveled in the thin high air of her new dignity and 
longed to make it known in America. She gave little Mary, 
Bownes the name of Mary Eliza Jumel to save troublesome 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


257 


explanations, and taught the child to call her “mama.” Then 
she put her in the school of Mademoiselle Laurau, that she 
might learn to be a lady. She made sure that the child 
should be taught all the necessary graces she herself had 
lacked, such as spelling and grammar, morals and music, 
history and drawing. 

Her own French was expected to be bad. It disguised 
her bad English. Her morals were sustained by the im¬ 
portance of assuring her own footing. There was no dearth 
of flirtation and intrigue in the salons, but she was still too 
uncertain of her path to risk any adventure. 

There was a torturing irony in her success. She was here 
in Paris, the familiar of all these supreme people, and for 
all she knew nobody in New York was aware of her vic¬ 
tories. The wretches perhaps supposed her dead and as¬ 
sumed that her carriage no longer glistened and journeyed 
along the ruts of Broadway because she had taken her last 
ride; or, worse, had lost all her money. 

Somehow she must get back to America and publish her 
success. One of the last days of November Jumel told her 
that he was going to Bordeaux to send off one of his ships. 
A fierce impulse to dash across the sea to New York seized 
her and irresistibly she had her things flung into trunks 
and the trunks fastened to the cabriolet. 

She went so hastily that she had no time to bid Mary 
good-by. It was five months later when she received in New 
York a letter the girl had already written begging her to 
come and hear a school concert and pleading 

bring me my gauze frock and my lace Vandyke and my little 
Vandyke of muslin. And ask Miss Laurau to let us have a fire 
in my room. My dear Mama, I embrace you with a thousand 
kisses. Believe me to be your fond and dutiful daughter, Mary 
Eliza Jumel. 

To this December letter Betty wrote an answer in May, 
explaining that the haste of departure left her no time to 
write: 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


258 

And as you know I am not fond of writing. The sacrifice 
I made was for your good, which I hope you will profit by it. 
I am engaged the present time in setting your room in order. 
It is admir’d by every one that see it. Your curtains is of 
blue sattain trim’ed with silver fringe, and your toilet the same. 
Altho at this distance still my thoughts is of you. Your affec¬ 
tionate mama, Eliza Jumel. 

The sweetest thing in her life was her love for this pleas¬ 
ant child and the gratitude she earned. The prattle and 
gossip of the innocent were dear to the woman whose own 
childhood had been so learned in all the things that little 
girls should not know. 

Mary wrote that she had won “two first prizes, one for 
history and the other for drawing; two accessits, one for 
musique & the other for writing. The Ducke of Berry had 
a little childe. It prouved to be a little girl, and the poor child 
lived but three days. Some people says that it was killed by 
its father; but I leave that for you to judge yourself.” 

Betty had a child of her very own and gave it none of her 
love. If she had any temptations to pay George Washing¬ 
ton Bowen the arrears of affection she owed him, she resisted 
them perfectly. 

To confess his existence now would be fatal. For all 
her accomplishments in France were useless in her cam¬ 
paign against New York. The old Dutch dike would not 
yield to her. 


CHAPTER XXXVI 


T HE mansion on the high hill overlooking New York was 
no longer a place of commanding power. It was a 
peak of exile. Betty was like a Prometheus chained to a 
cliff, with the vulture of social ambition picking at her liver 
eternally. 

She could not amuse herself with intrigues, for every¬ 
body in town was eying her askance and waiting for her to 
go back to the dissolute life of her early days. She had 
had enough of such love as she had known. The word 
“love” was a trade word with her. It stank of merchandise. 
Since the brief girlhood romance with the young Pierre who 
had touched her heart and died, she had not known what 
it meant to adore a man, to melt into the desperate bliss 
of surrender with no thought, no fear, no calculation. 

After Pierre’s death and her one experience with an un¬ 
willing, a disgusting motherhood, love had been a treadmill, 
a business, a way of gaining clothes and food and wine. 
She was neither tempted nor tempting nowadays. 

She paced the lawn in front of her home and stared at 
New York hungrily, cursed it for a cruel Jericho whose walls 
she longed to cry down upon its stubborn citizens. 

She kept a solitary state, with servants enough and Henri 
Nodine as master of the house. She grew so lonely that she 
turned to Rlie Laloi. He had been kind to her in her hours 
of exile, and had deserted her only when she cheated herself 
into respectability. Surely he would find her pitiable enough 
now to forgive. 

Her horses and her carriage took her as a returning 
prodigal to the street where he kept his old bookshop. But 
the place where it had stood was covered with a great ware¬ 
house. She tried to find where Laloi had moved. No one 

259 


260 the golden ladder 

knew, and it was long after and by chance that she learned 
his fate. During one of the cholera waves he had been 
found in a shabby room dead, alone. The place of his 
burial she could not find. 

One of the newspapers announced the belated tidings that 
Captain John Delacroix had been killed in a storm off 
Kerguelen’s Land. She was widowed even of that ancient 
friendship. She wept but not for Delacroix; she wept for 
the gay little thing she had been when he changed her rags 
to silk and taught her the world. 

Her only pleasure now was the martyrdom of driving 
down Broadway behind the beautiful horses that she always 
kept. Her one pride was to win the servile bows of the 
merchants by her lavish purchases. Broadway was lengthen¬ 
ing and the buildings about it increasing in number and 
magnificence. But it was still dusty, muddy, sun-blistered or 
blizzard-riddled by turns. The swine and the bad women 
were more numerous than ever. One of the town poets 
wrote of “the pigs and Paphians” that thronged Broadway. 

One afternoon she was startled by a voice that sounded 
her name with affection: 

“Madame Jumel! Madame Jumel!” 

She called to her coachman to stop, and out across the 
mud ran a young mother with a babe in arms. Betty stared 
at her and found nothing familiar in her face, unless it 
were a certain worship in the eyes, a look that she had not 
often seen. 

“You don’t remember me!” the woman laughed. 

“I seem to—and yet! Your face I know, but-” 

“Do you remember Susanna Pennery?” 

“Susanna Pennery? Susanna Pennery?” 

It was terrifying to have both names and faces slipping 
from one’s memory. It had a threat of old age. 

After a moment of teasing suspense, the woman said: 

“Don’t torment your memory, Madame Jumel. You were 
only a young girl when you met me, and I was a child. It 
was when you were coming from Providence to New York 
on the packet, and my mother was drowned, swept over- 



THE GOLDEN LADDER 


261 

board. I was alone and afraid, and I cried terribly. But 
you were good to me. Oh, you were so good to me! 
You took me into your bed and mothered me. You let me 
hold on to your hand for days and nights till we came to 
New York. My father met me there, and by the time I 
had told him about mamma’s death and your goodness you 
had gone. We couldn’t find you and we went back to Phila¬ 
delphia. I grew up and married, and this is my baby. I am 
Mrs. Sandys now. When my baby grows up I’ll teach her 
to pray for you as I’ve always done. My prayers seem to 
have been answered, for I see you are rich and married 
and all.” 

Betty wept blissfully. This was something new in her 
life, a rose tangled among the thistles of her memory— 
a good deed blooming hidden in her past. 

She made Susanna climb into her carriage and took the 
baby on her own lap, and she flung a tear-lit glance of pride 
at the knot of staring people on the curb. 

Among them, who should appear but Mrs. Dolly Beadle- 
stone. She had helped Betty once, but she was shabby now. 
Doctor Ketelkas had wearied of her and she had taken to 
drink, apparently. Hilariously now she waved to Betty 
an uncertain hand and cried in a boozy welcome, “Hello, 
Betty, my dear!” Betty glared at her and took a bitter 
pleasure in finding somebody that she could snub. She cut 
Dolly dead, and Dolly went into peals of laughter, shouting : 

“I told you you would! I told you you’d cut me some 
day, and now I’m cut!” 

Betty shuddered and told the coachman to drive on. 
Susanna chattered as fast as the carriage wheels. She 
evidently knew nothing of Betty except that she had money 
and a carriage. Betty’s fame, good or ill, had not pene¬ 
trated to Philadelphia. Obscurity had its recompenses here 
and there. 

After a time there came out of the crowds a loud call: 

“Stop! Stop that carriage!” 

The coachman craned his neck and drew his hands back 
to his breast. 


262 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

Susanna and Madame Jumel looked round, and Susanna 

cried: ' „ 

“It’s my husband! I so want you to meet him. 

But the man brought no welcome in his countenance. He 
stood panting and frowning and holding out his hand. 
Susanna put hers into it and said: 

“Mr. Sandys, I want to present you to Madame Jumel.” 

Mr. Sandys touched his hat with a surly deference and 
tried to drag his wife from the carriage. She held back 
a moment, amazed, protesting: 

“It was Madame Jumel who was so good to me when-- * 

“Then she will be good enough to let you alone. She will 
be good enough to understand why I cannot permit my wife 
to ride abroad in her famous carriage. She will oblige me 
by handing me down my child.” 

Susanna gazed stupidly at Betty, as deeply mystified by 
life as she had been by death when the wave tore her mother 
from the world. 

“What does he mean, ma’am?” she babbled. 

“He will tell you, no doubt, what lies he has heard of me,” 
was the best that Betty could answer. “But obey him as 
the law requires of a wife. Here, take your child. I thank 
you for your prayers. You shall have mine.” 

Sandys dragged his wife from the step, snatched the baby 
from Betty’s outstretched arms, and hurried back to the 
pavement, wedging his way through the crowd. 

Betty was sick, sick. She closed her eyes a moment, then 
tossed her head and called: 

“Drive on!” 

“Where, ma’am?” 

“Home!” 

And that was a sour word. 

In her despairful solitude she felt a recoil of her heart 
to the old scenes. She needed a mooring ground, a feeling 
of being rooted to some place. 

Her hated Providence became a haven she was fain to 
return to. But she had braved its memory once and the 
very children had hooted her out. 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


263 

She was so poor and so detached from the world that 
she sent for little Mary Bownes to leave the school in France 
and join her “mama” in New York. 

The isolation of Betty was only emphasized when Mary 
arrived from Paris, for she was at the age when lovers 
should be gathering and squiring her to dances and to 
sleigh rides. But no invitations came. Other young girls 
were not permitted to call at the notorious home of Betty 
Jumel, and no young men found out how brilliant Mary was. 

To get back to Paris was Betty’s one desire now. She 
was frozen out of New York again. She advertised again 
that the mansion was for rent. 

She was the more willing to leave the hateful land since 
she heard that another of her jumbled family had gone 
wrong—even Lavinia Ballou, Betty’s illegitimate half-sister, 
had an illegitimate daughter whom she called Ann Eliza 
Nightingale. It seemed to be a family habit to give proof 
of fertility before attempting matrimony, as certain savage 
races require their women to bear a child before they can 
get a husband. 

Ann Eliza had married a baker in Christopher Street 
and Betty drove down to pay her a call, though she did not 
descend from her wheeled throne. She made an engage¬ 
ment to meet Lavinia herself on the Bloomingdale Road and 
they had a long talk together. Betty was a little softened 
by Lavinia’s mishap, but Lavinia had grown as defiant as 
Betty had been in the same plight. Lavinia came afoot and 
would not ride in Betty’s carriage. Betty would not walk. 
Lavinia would not be patronized. She would not call at the 
mansion in her shabby clothes. And they parted. 


CHAPTER XXXVII 


W HEN she reached home the cook met Betty in great 
excitement: 

“Lawk-a-massy, ma’am, there’s been a king here to see 


you!” 

“A king? What king?” 

“Leastways he says he was a king. Never haying saw 
a king, so to speak, I couldn’t give him the lie, being as he 
was so pleasant spoken and so plump and all. 

“What king?” 

“King Joseph of Spain he called hisself, and who was I to 
give him the lie?” 

Betty groaned at her continual ill luck. Jumel had told 
her that when he pleaded with Napoleon to come to the 
United States the eldest brother, Joseph, had begged^ the 
Emperor to flee with him and had even offered to substitute 
himself as prisoner to cover Napoleon’s escape. Though 
his pleas were as vain as Jumel’s, he had made his own way 
secretly to New York, dwelt a while at Claremont, not far 
from Betty’s home, and then set up as a farmer in New 
Jersey. Learning that he was planning to move to New 
York, Betty had written to him and offered her house for 


rent. 

While she had wrangled with her half-sister in the open 
road a king had called upon her and found her out. She 
demanded of the cook: 

“What did he say? What did you do?” 

‘Well, he sniffed the air like and says, Wat is it?’ and 
I says ‘Pork and cabbage, Your Honor. I’m cookin’ it 
for my dinner. Want some?’ and he says, Mercy, may we! 
or something. So I take him into the kitchen and 

264 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 265 

“You took the King of Spain into the kitchen and gave 
him pork and cabbage!” 

“Yes, ma’am, and he et enough for two farmers. And he 
told me if he was still king or ever got back to be a king 
he would give me a cord on blur or something.” 

Betty moaned at such a reception. She wrote a letter of 
apology and regret and told King Joseph how high the honor 
and how low the price would be if he should lease her 
mansion. And he wrote to her: 

Madam: 

I am sorry for all the trouble you have taken in sending 
me the list of the furniture and your kind offers of your beauti¬ 
ful country place, but since I have decided not to leave my 
estate in New Jersey I can only reply by thanking you, and 
renewing my compliments. 

Joseph Bonaparte. 

Betty smiled dismally, folded the letter, and put it away. 
Kings, duchesses, and countesses wrote letters to her, but the 
shoddy aristocracy of New York snubbed her. She gave 
up the useless effort to win them and went back to France 
with Mary. 

Once more the compliments of the great rained down upon 
her: “The Countess Loyaute de Loyaute begs Madame 
Jumel and Mademoiselle her niece to do her the honor of 
spending the evening with her.” The Countess of Hautpoul 
solicited a contribution for the poor wife of the court saddler. 
Betty was advised to buy a box near the king’s at the Grand 
Opera. The Bishop of Nancy invited her to a ceremony 
presided over by the Cardinal of Clermont Tonnerre. 

The Marquise de la Suze devoted many letters to the 
conversion of Betty to Catholicism and exclaimed: “How 
good God is to have granted the fervent and continual 
prayers which I have made Him for the eternal welfare of 
your soul.” 

Betty smiled craftily at this, for her welfare seemed to 
be guided in a most ungodly channel. 

She was devoutly endeavoring to rid herself of the plain 


266 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

“madame” and set something more sonorous before her 
name. The grandeur of receiving all these letters from all 
these peers and peeresses was diminishing under the strain 
of having to confess herself a mere “madame.” In France 
the washerwoman who scoured her clothes, the dressmaker 
who sent her gowns and bonnets and fichus to select from, 
the very charwoman who scrubbed the glistening floors, must 
be called “madame.” 

She sat and practiced her name as la Comtesse de Jumel, 
Madame la Marquise de Jumel! Even la Baronne Jumel 
was not bad. 

The king was squandering titles and some of the yokels’ 
that Napoleon had ennobled could spell no better than Betty. 
Why should she not be decorated, too ? 

She cast about for a way of achieving her new ambition. 

She had gone as far as she could, it seemed, by the practice 
of rigorous correctness. She heard much gossip of the 
power of love. By means of their gifts of love milliners 
and even lighter women had made themselves royal favorites 
and had queened it over the lawful queens. 

There was a certain Comte de la Force who was always 
hovering about her on the Bourbon evenings at the Jumel 
residence in the Place Vendome. He was always whispering 
into her back hair that she was cruelly beautiful and un- 
beautifully cold. He boasted constantly, too, of his close 
friendship with the king. He sighed : 

“I can get anything from His Majesty and nothing from 
you.” 

Here was the manifest instrument for her advancement. 
She reverted to her old methods and brought out of her past 
all the tricks of her ancient trade. She made love to the 
Comte with every appearance of timidity and helplessness 
before his irresistible charms. She compared herself to an 
unprotected citadel yielding to the siege of a great general. 

With all the deftness in her power she insinuated that 
the way to win her to complete surrender was to secure 
her a title. She thought she phrased it rather cleverly: 

“If I were only a comtesse, how I could love a comte! 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 267 

But being a simple madame, there is an impassable gulf 
between us.” 

“To secure for madame the bagatelle of a title would be 
the least that I would do in return for a smile,” the comte 
made haste to respond. 

By a smile, of course, he meant much more, much more. 
Once having learned that there was hope of conquest, he 
grew as impetuous in his attack as he was deliberate in his 
achievement of the title. His promises were so confident 
that he swept Betty away from all thought of caution. She 
trusted him too well. 

And finally when the delay in her admission to the peerage 
grew unbearable, she took courage from the fact that she had 
already paid in advance. She committed the monstrous in¬ 
discretion of writing to the king himself. She secured the 
aid of a man who knew the forms, phrases, and the style 
and sent His Majesty a long appeal) whose gossipy familiarity 
stunned him: 

Sire: 

Every time I have had the honor of seeing your Majesty, the 
graciousness with which you have deigned to notice my carriage 
and the great kindness with which you bow to me, makes me 
feel like writing to you. But once out of your presence, courage 
fails me. 

The return of your Majesty caused me so much joy that I 
seemed to be inspired with new courage to present a petition in 
favor of my husband. My husband left France at the beginning 
of the Revolution and established a home in New York 
(U.S.A.) with the resolution of never again seeing his native 
land until the return of the Bourbons. 

He became a merchant and has been very fortunate in his 
business. . . . The most celebrated manufacturers of France 
have worked for him. . . . His kindness of heart and his direct¬ 
ness in business have made him known and loved throughout 
the United States. 

What a joyous day for him when he got the news of the 
return of the Bourbons. Immediately he made haste to sell his 
ships and his stocks and to leave his temporary home which 
was for him a kind of exile. 


268 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

We came to Paris, and he, seeing a great deal of misfortune, 
was moved by his kindness of heart to set up several manu¬ 
facturers, who to-day are prosperous. His lofty nature will not 
allow him to ask for a place at Court for himself, as he thinks 
he has not yet done enough for his country to deserve such a 
favor. 

But, accustomed to being received as persons of high position, 
and our fortune admitting of living in excellent style, and hav¬ 
ing also the good fortune of knowing many ladies of the Court, 
I often find myself embarrassed. 

When I see that I have no title and my husband no cross—in 
spite of all he has done for his country and his devotion to his 
king—I feel utterly discouraged, and beg him to go back to 
his adopted country. 

But knowing your Majesty’s extreme kindness, I am anew 
inspired with the hope that you will not ignore a subject so 
worthy as Stephen Jumel. Whatever post your Majesty might 
deign to offer—even without remuneration—it would be his 
greatest delight to fill it, and your Majesty would find in Stephen 
Jumel a faithful subject and in his wife eternal gratitude. 

Never dreaming how amazing such a letter would be to 
a Bourbon monarch, Betty sent it forward and awaited with 
impatience the royal benediction. 

She sat one afternoon reading over the copy she had 
kept. She admired the cleverness with which she had em¬ 
phasized Jumel’s adoration of the Bourbons and omitted 
all reference to his idolatry of their arch-enemy, Napoleon. 
She liked the implied threat of a return to the United States. 

It was all according to the best traditions of the diplomatic 
arts ; and when a servant brought her word that Monsieur 
le Comte de la Force had called she ordered him shown into 
her salon. 

She did not order the doors closed upon them as she had 
done during the more intimate negotiations. Her husband 
was at his office, of course; Mary was out for a drive in 
the Bois with the house guest, la Comtesse de la Pagerie. 
The servants did not matter. 

She awaited the Comte de la Force with warm assurance. 
She kept her copy of her letter in hand so that when he 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


269 

announced that the title had been granted to*her she might 
take all due credit to herself for her share in its expedition. 

She wondered whether she were already a comtesse, a 
marquise—what ? 

She kept her seat and nodded with the condescension of a 
peeress when the comte appeared and waited for the servant 
to withdraw. 

She was surprised to find that he did not meet her smile 
with his usual ingratiation. In fact he glared, and with 
bloodshot eyes. He did not breathe compliments; he panted 
with rage. 

Then he advanced on her with such speed and ferocity 
that she cringed before an expected blow in the face. In¬ 
stead, she received a deluge of French so volubly delivered 
that she could hardly catch a word of it. 

“Plus lentement un peu, s’il vous plait” she pleaded. 

And he repeated his message with such slowness that every 
phrase was the lash of a whip. Her mind was in an uproar. 
It must translate each French word into English. It must 
resist the panic of her faculties and reassemble them for 
self-defense. As she made it out, what he was saying was 
this: 

“Insolent Yankee! What have you done? You have 
made me a cause for laughter throughout the court. His 
Majesty sends for me and frowns upon me as if I were a 
lackey. He has in his fat hand, a long, long letter. He 
tosses it beneath my eyes and commands me to read it. He 
asks me if you are the lady for whose husband I asked a 
reward. I must stammer ‘Yes, Sire, but if it please Your 

Majesty-’ He breaks in ‘It does not please Our Majesty. 

Surely if Monsieur le Comte de la Force wishes to buy a 
lady’s favors he should not offer her ours. This Madame 
Jumel tells us that I bow to her with gracious smiles. Does 
she think that I know all the faces I bow to? Does she 
not know that thousands of my subjects line my path 
wherever I move? Perhaps you have told her that I also 
shall call upon her and confirm your promises! In any 
case, Monsieur le Comte, if I must sell the titles at my 



270 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

disposal for the smiles of ladies, will you not permit me to 
select the ladies and to collect the smiles myself? To 
certain battles the king sends his lieutenants; as for the 
others, he prefers to engage in person. Have the kindness 
to inform your Madame Telle-et-telle that I have no titles 
to sell this week/ ” 

This was abysmal news to Betty. The royal sarcasm and 
the blood-curdling humiliation of the comte meant little to 
her. She realized the idleness of the king’s talk of selling 
his own titles for favors. The gossip ran that his dissolute¬ 
ness ended with his love of coarse remarks. He was called 
Louis the Oyster for more reasons than one. He was colder 
than the sixteenth Louis, who had kept his Marie Antoinette 
a bride for so incredible a time. Louis XVIII was so fat, 
too, that he could hardly open a letter with his over-plump 
hands, and he was trundled about the palace in a wheeled 
chair, and lifted into his carriage and out of it like a vat 
of beer. There was no hope of flirting with that whale. 

Betty’s gleaming hopes vanished. Betty would never be 
more than “madame.” She had had trouble enough in 
acquiring that dignity. It was to be her final triumph. She 
was not to be rewarded either for her husband’s vast finan¬ 
cial services to the Bourbons, or for her own personal 
gratuities to this man who dared to snarl at her: 

“You do not swoon! You do not cry out with horror at 
what I had to endure! When His Majesty had finished, he 
crumpled your letter and dropped it on the floor. He kicked 
it aside. If he had kicked me I should have suffered no 
more. He waited for me to speak. I could do- nothing 
but sweat. If it had been blood that streamed from my pores 
it would have not been too much. 

“And then His Majesty begins to laugh, to roar. His 
great belly rolls like a ship in a storm. He holds his side 
with one hand and groans, ‘Oh, Monsieur le Comte and 
your Madame Une Telle, you are a pair of assassins. You 
have broken my ribs and suffocated me.’ 

“Around his table stood his ministers. Old Club-foot 
Talleyrand whispered something to the prince at his elbow 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 271 

and the prince exploded. My only wonder is that I did 
not die.” 

He waited for Betty to grovel in apologies, to faint along 
the floor, to burst into the vapors. She was ready to burst, 
but she was ( restrained as with hoops by the maddening limits 
of her French vocabulary. 

She had heard what the old trulls of Providence called 
the boozy slave-sailors who had not paid their rent. She 
knew an army of wharf-side terms that would have made 
Rabelais wish that he had studied English instead of the 
Greek that nearly lost him his life. 

But all the French she could think of was the sort of thing 
she had studied to say when a duchess praised her coiffure 
or a countess thanked her for her carriage. 

Her throat ached with a very quinsy of venom she could 
not expel. To escape asphyxiation at last she let her feel¬ 
ings go in her native tongue. She fairly bawled at the comte 
that he was a thief and a cheat, to have robbed her of her 
love and her honor on false promises. 

The comte could not understand a word she said, but her 
very features were obscene. There was objurgation in the 
mere puffs of air that smoked from her lips. And at length 
with a final oath that would have done Queen Elizabeth or 
Catherine of Russia proud, she shot her fist into his face. 
He was too far from her to be hurt, but the blow sobered 
him in his own drunkenness of anger. 

He must either strike back or laugh her off. He found 
now a little of the mirth that had rocked the king. 

He said so slowly that she understood each word: 

“When madame expressed a wish for a title I promised 
it to her as a lover promises his beloved anything that will 
give her happiness. I hoped to bring you the royal docu¬ 
ment. But now I understand you: when you said you loved 
me, when you expired with rapture in my arms, it was not 
love of me that inflamed you, but love of yourself. You did 
not embrace me, but a ghost, the ghost of the title you 
demanded. You have sinned, madame, but at least you have 
committed an original sin. You betrayed your husband in 


272 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

order to advance him. Even if the king would not ennoble 
him, you have given him a title, and one of the oldest. 

She tried to strike at him again, but her hand weakened, 
her knees relaxed. She sank back into her chair. 

The comte bowed and murmured: 

“If the Comtesse-that-can-never-be will permit her servant 
to withdraw.” 

He walked out, laughing softly. 

When she lifted her eyes at last she glanced past the little 
door that closed upon him, through the arch into the greater 
chamber beyond. 

There she saw her husband. 


CHAPTER XXXVIII 


I F Jumel had come forward, hurled her to the floor and 
trampled on her, Betty would not have protested. If he 
had drawn a pistol and shot her down, she could have 
forgiven him. 

But he stood wavering in complete dismay. 

Since he said nothing, Betty assumed that he had heard 
nothing. She came forward to remark with casual fatuity: 
“You have come home from the office, I see.” 

“Yes, my head did ache so I could hardly see. But I can 
hear. I did hear!” 

Betty made a feeble parry: 

“What did you hear? Comte de la Force’s drunken talk? 
Surely you wouldn’t take seriously anything that man said ?” 
Jumel shook his head and smiled sardonically: 

“The words of the comte perhaps, no; but how can I not 
believe you what you confess ?” 

Betty was stunned, but she braved his gentle, mournful 
countenance and tried to eye him down. She demanded 
brusquely: 

“Well, what of it?” 

Jumel’s smile was pitiful. That and the dreary wagging 
of his head belonged less to a man who' has caught his wife 
in an infamy than to a child that regards a broken toy. 
He said: 

“In France we forgive much to a crime of passion. But 
there was no passion in your affair, only greed. Go back 
to America, madame. 

“When you did sinned long ago, I have thought it was 
becose you are so poor and lunly. I have sorry for you. 
I forgived you. Now you are rich. You have love, moneys, 
pride—all! Still you sin! Is it then sin itself you love? 
Go back to America, madame. 

273 


274 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

“You try to get me title, yes. But not for me—for you! 
that you might wear it. How is it you are so clever and 
such a fool to think I could wear a title winned by your 
intrigues. I could not accept even from the king. To buy 
a little honor with so much dishonor ? No, never in life! I 
am merchant. I do not buy cheap thing at high price. And 
if I buyed, how do I dare to wear it? I am merchant and 
I advertise—but not my shame. Should I put on my shield 
the words of Panurge, ‘Les comes que me faisoit ma femme 
sont comes d’abondance f Non, non, madame. Go back to 
America!” 

“And to poverty ?” sighed Betty, who read her doom in his 
gentle manner. 

He laughed: “No, no! I give you money—all I have, if 
it needs you. Always I can earn more. Money is true to 
me. She loves me. She comes, obeys. But I cannot com¬ 
mand love. I shall not try no more. I do not divorce you, 
madame, but I love you no more. Adieu !” 

The tempest was over. They were both so weary with 
their tragic disappointments that they sank into chairs, inane, 
bored to death with life. 

When the Comtesse de la Pagerie brought Mary home 
and the girl ran laughing to salute them, they could not even 
pretend to be gay. 

“What makes you two so glum?” Mary demanded. After 
a long silence Betty answered: 

“I have just learned that I must go back to New York.” 

“But why? But why?” 

“Because your papa insists,” Betty faltered, and Jumel 
added: 

“There is important business your mama must do for me 
in America. You go with.” 

The girl’s cheeks were rainy with sudden tears, as she 
wailed: 

“But nobody comes to see us in America! It is lonely 
there. Here everybody welcomes us. Papa, papa, don’t 
exile us to America again!” 

Jumel’s heart suffered for her and himself, but he would 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


275 

not repent his decision. Betty was dead to him. All he 
owed her was a decent funeral. Like many another mourner, 
he was impelled to fill the coffin with rich gifts. 

He confirmed the deed of the New York mansion and 
gave her a deed in trust for the use of a property on Broad¬ 
way at the corner of Liberty Street during her lifetime. 
He let her take the jewelry of the Empress Josephine, though 
it had cost him a hundred and twenty-five thousand francs. 

But he was making money so fast that he was ready to 
surrender to Betty the whole American continent and all 
therein that had been his. He gave her a power of attorney. 
He could never have imagined the use she would put it to. 

Once more Betty must cross the Atlantic. She had not 
even her mansion to return to. It was rented to strangers. 
She and Mary took lodgings with a Dutch farmer on Long 
Island, two miles and more from Brooklyn. But she went 
to New York every day to take care of her property. 

New York was much changed and much the same. Broad¬ 
way was still a dangerous place to drive in. Sometimes a 
herd of a thousand or more cattle went lowing up the street. 
Throngs of hogs still wandered about, tipping over carriages, 
covering pedestrians with slime and eating dead cats and 
dogs in the gutters. 

A fire-engine company of gentlemen racing to Maiden 
Lane had been brought down in a vast heap by a sow that 
darted across their path, and the engine they drew had run 
over many of the volunteers with disastrous effect. 

Laws were passed forbidding the streets to the swine, but 
the laws were not honored, and when hog-catchers went 
about gathering up the strays, their carts were overturned 
and their prisoners released by indignant citizens. Hog riots 
were common and showed that the poor who owned the 
wanderers would not be bullied by the rich who could pen 
them. 

Betty’s carriage still created a stir wherever it passed. It 
was one of the ten in town, and two of those were driven by 
eccentrics. The mad poet, MacDonald Clarke, had his Til¬ 
bury with gilded harness; and the negro, Dandy Cox, who 


276 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

had made what was a fortune for him as a scourer of 
men’s clothes, drove a Stanhope, with another negro as a 
footman perched on the box behind. His black wife gave 
receptions and changed her clothes three or four times dur¬ 
ing the evening, just to show that she had the clothes. She 
was a Betty Jumel in ebony. 

Negroes were rising in the world. One black woman had 
risen very high in the Potter’s Field, where she was gibbeted 
for trying in vain to set a building on fire. Slavery was going 
out of style. There were only two hundred and fifty slaves 
in a population of 125,000, and a law had been passed in 
1822 abolishing slavery altogether after July 4th, 1827, 
though the minors were not to be freed till 1830. 

The negroes were growing ambitious. They had a theater 
of their own where one of them enacted Shakespeare s 
proud heroes.” But, of course, they were not permitted 
to ride in the busses or in the steamboat cabins, or to go to 
the theaters. Even in the churches they were only permitted 
to occupy a special section. 

There was a new City Hall, all of marble, in the park. 
The Potter’s Field had been leveled and its name changed to 
Washington Parade. Richmond Hill, where Washington 
had lived, and Adams, and then Aaron Burr, had been razed 
and the famous old mansion lowered on cradles to the com¬ 
mon level of the new street. People said that New York 
was losing all its picturesque antiquity. 

Hunters were still shooting woodcock and snipe out in 
Lispenard Meadows beyond the Canal, which had been 
covered over and changed into a street. A stage ran all 
the way to Bloomingdale. 

Steam was invading the world. A sailing vessel with 
folding paddle wheels run by steam had crossed the ocean. 
Mr. Vanderbilt’s steam ferry made the trip to New Jersey 
in fourteen minutes, which was nearly three hours less than 
of old. This was a convenience to Betty. 

Excursions on steamboats were a passion, and on Sundays 
thousands of people were carried about the bay and the 
rivers. The clergymen of the city found that their con- 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 277 

gregations were dwindling (as always) and laid the blame 
for modem wickedness and levity on the steamboat (as 
always, on the newest public interest). 

They called a great mass meeting of five thousand people 
and proposed an ordinance forbidding such ungodly pastime. 
To their amazement, the assembly not only voted the 
dominies down, but protested against their interference in the 
public amusement. 

Even the food of the public was changing. The orna¬ 
mental but poisonous red “love apples” were being called 
“tomatoe figs,” or “tomatoes” for short, and eaten in great 
quantities without fatality. Strange how the poisons of 
one generation become the food of the next! 

The sap of maple trees was being cooked into a sugar 
and sold as a delicacy. Ice cream was coming in and 
threatening the greedy with death by internal congelation. 

Cold water was still accounted a perilous drink, and those 
who imbibed it straight from the town pumps were advised 
in a proclamation by the Humane Society to wet their wrists 
and foreheads first, or to temper it with molasses. 

Water was coming into enlarged consideration everywhere. 
It was hard to get and unpleasant to taste, but there was a 
growing conviction that it ought to be cheaper and more 
common. There were not wanting skeptical souls who 
asserted that the ever-recurrent plagues of yellow fever and 
cholera were not due to judgments of God in punishment 
of national crimes, but to lack of water and cleanliness. 

The more substantial and respectable elements of the 
population did their best to counteract these degenerate 
notions, but with little result. In many states laws were 
passed forbidding people to indulge themselves in the 
criminal nonsense of baths, which were both indecent and 
injurious to health. Yet there was so little respect or 
reverence for the law that certain criminals continued to 
take baths in secret. And as usual, some people boasted of 
the vice without practicing it. It did not interest Betty. 

There were swimming pools in New York, and on one 
day a week females were encouraged to disgrace themselves 


278 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

by floundering about in an element plainly never meant for 
mankind. If God had wanted us to swim he would un¬ 
doubtedly have given us fins and scales. 

People were even adventuring into the ocean. At Rocka- 
way Beach and Cape May women were actually wading into 
the waves up to their waists. They wore flannel or woolen 
dresses, and when they were in the water or coming from 
it gentlemen were expected to remain out of sight and see¬ 
ing. But the mere thought was so shocking that really 
virtuous females would not discuss - it with genteel males. 

Furthermore, the new insanity was causing an increasing 
exodus to the seaside every summer. Hotels and boarding 
houses grew up along the edge of the surf and throngs 
endured every discomfort in the mad pursuit of fashion. 

All this meant an increase in the number of steamboats, 
stages, and inns and a general lowering of public morals 
(which are forever in a state of further descent, but never 
seem to strike a final resting-place on hardpan). 

Good manners were departing with good morals. The 
Advocate announced that a young churl had been seen on 
Broadway with a lighted cigar as early as nine o’clock in 
the morning! The fine old custom of tobacco chewing and 
spitting was, of course, respectable at all hours. 

Theaters, operas, and dances were increasing in number 
and popularity. Foreign actors and singers were pouring 
into America and further threatening the virtue of the totter¬ 
ing nation. The night life of the city was blatant and 
dazzling. People seemed to live for nothing but pleasure. 
Doctors stated that the mad speed of life would undoubtedly 
destroy civilization and bring on disease. 

So many citizens were staying out so late and making 
such clamor at all hours, pounding their knockers for ad¬ 
mittance to their homes, that night latches were invented 
to do away with the great keys. Some persons were putting 
in bells that rang inside the houses, to replace the knockers 
that whacked outside and woke everybody in the block 
except the people immediately concerned. The first door 
bell was probably laid down by certain unfortunates who 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 279 

were wakened from their reputable slumbers late one night 
by the clatter of their knocker. Rushing to the windows to 
learn if the town were afire, they were rewarded by the 
words of their next-door neighbor who looked up and said: 

. Sorr y t0 disturb you, but my knocker is broke and I’m 
using yours to wake up my family. Go right back to sleep. 
111 have my wife awake before long.” 

mght life ° f New York knew Bet ty no more, 
bhe had been a scholar in all the evils of an earlier day 
when it was also going to the devil; though those very days 
were now mourned as an epoch of Arcadian simplicity. 

She was no longer the young and voluptuous siren of 
then. Men did not now follow her on the street, or gaze 
after her with desire. She dressed with more gorgeousness 
than ever. She wore the jewelry of monarchs and she rode 
lofty and conspicuous in a carriage. But she no longer 
encountered in the eyes of the men that look of eager interest, 
nor in the women’s eyes the quick glance of jealous fear. 

To save her face she had given out a statement that she 
had returned to America to take care of her dear husband’s 
interests while he managed his European affairs. To save 
her face, she must make a pretense of attending to those 
interests. 

Every day, therefore, she made the weary ride from Long 
Island and visited brokers and lawyers. She had to be 
taught the financial A B C’s, but once she learned her 
alphabet she uncovered an unsuspected genius for business. 

She found that buying-and-selling was a gambling game as 
thrilling as any she had ever played in the salons of Paris. 
Money-making was imbued with a kind of evil sensuality 
as exciting as the practices of commercial love had ever been. 

She thought it a discovery; it really was a change in her 
own soul. Nature, that finds a vice for every age, was steal¬ 
ing away Betty’s graces and her amorous usefulness, but 
substituting a new instinct. 

. Ladies who can no longer feel nor inspire physical tempta¬ 
tion can still be very wicked. For they can become gossips, 
backbiters, meddlers, reformers, censors, misers. They can 


2 8 o the golden ladder 

lie about the innocence of their own youth, and abuse their 
contemporaries. They can pick reputations to pieces. Vul¬ 
tures and buzzards do not need to be beautiful or con- 

scientious. . , 

Betty had no inclination to the ferocious morality of the 
reformed wanton or the withered siren. Her proper sin was 
greed. She prostituted her body no longer, but her soul 
now to the gaining of lands and mortgages and moneys in 
the bank. She began to plot against Jumel. She began to 
despise him not only for his insolent mercy to her, but for 
his incapacity as a man of finance. She would prove to him 
that she was the better merchant of the two. And as soon as 
she could she would rid herself of him. But first she must 
get rich—richer—richest! 

The ecstasy of economy came upon her slowly, and with 
frequent relapses. She gave up her horses with most regret 
and drove her own gig one day to New York with only 
a single horse ahead of her. And that horse slipped and 
fell with a crash that brought a merchant out of his shop 
in alarm. He gave her one glance, sneered to other wit¬ 
nesses, “It’s only Madame Jumel!” and returned to his shop. 

Betty picked herself up, hardly noticing her other bruises 
for the wrench to her pride. She misunderstood the mer¬ 
chant’s scorn entirely and made haste to buy four gray horses 
and a new gown and to drive once more up Broadway in 
state. The town began to grin once more. She was as little 
respected behind four gray horses as behind one or two 
blacks! It was a hard world to conquer. 


CHAPTER XXXIX 


VT'ET what else was there for a woman of ambition to seek 

-a- or to look forward to but social favor, the daily accolade 
of a How-d’you-do? If she lost her reputation she lost 
everything. 

Men, however, were not ruined by scandal. The best 
women regarded the worst rake with an indulgence that 
verged on admiration. They smiled on the male sinner and 
flung his woman accomplice overboard. 

The thing that brought Aaron Burr to the dust was not 
his ill repute for profligacy. That had always followed him. 
It had not checked him on his way to the Presidency. For 
if they had once begun the business of denying power to 
men because of their love affairs, what man would ever have 
won so much as a nomination for—hog-catcher? If Burr 
scattered illegitimate white children about haphazard, Thomas 
Jefferson, the god of his party, was accused of manufactur¬ 
ing mulattoes for sale and that had not kept him from being 
President twice to Burr's not quite once. 

Burr was discarded because he had failed in politics; 
because he had killed a popular rival and made a beloved 
saint of a much-derided sinner; because he owed a mountain 
of money; because he could not pay it back; because he was 
a menace to other ambitious politicians; because he pro¬ 
claimed dangerous views about allowing the common people 
to vote. 

He denounced the presidential candidate, James Monroe, 
and praised Andrew Jackson because Jackson believed in 
the popular voice. Burr was accounted a dangerous man 
because of his politics. His morals were matters for the 
gossips, not for the voters. His law practice went on as 
well as if he had been a saint, because he won most of 
his cases. 


281 


282 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


Betty decided that, if she would escape from the asphyxia¬ 
tion of being ignored, she must succeed as a business man. 
There was no hope for a woman in politics. And not much 
encouragement in business. 

She was tempted to put her affairs in the hands of the 
best lawyer in town. The best lawyer was probably the 
worst man, Aaron Burr. But Betty avoided him because 
he was a failure, and she wanted success. 

She chose for her attorney Alexander Hamilton, junior. 
He was a clever lawyer and, better yet, employing him gave 
her an excuse to visit his mother when Betty grew in¬ 
sufferably eager to sit under a roof where respectability kept 
out the rain. 

Business is other people's money, and Betty’s only capital 
was her husband’s fortune. But he had given her full power 
of attorney. He had been as trusting as the King Lear 
who turned his kingdom over to his daughters, and his 
experience was as full of disillusionment. 

The more Betty thought of Jumel the more she despised 
him. He had failed to get her into New York society, and 
after she got into Paris society he had thrown her out. She 
owed him no gratitude and she must take care of herself, 
provide against the years that grew heavier and heavier. 

She made use of his power of attorney to transfer a 
number of real-estate properties from Jumel’s name to her 
own. 

While she was robbing him of his wealth he had grown 
over-weary of trying to hate Betty. He wrote her a letter 
imploring her to believe that he still loved her. 

When the surprise wore off Betty despised him a little 
better and went on taking his properties away from him. 
She knew now that she was the cleverer financier of the two. 

Her good opinion of herself was soon confirmed, for she 
received from Jumel a sudden letter asking her for money! 
This gave her a delicious sensation at first. The great 
international merchant who had once lifted, her from poverty, 
dazzled her with a home, a carriage, a ship, his own name, an 
empress’s jewels—he, even he, was writing her a begging 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 283 

letter. He was deeply involved in investments that had 
suddenly gone wrong. He must have cash to tide him over. 

She was tempted to drive to her banker and dash him off 
a bill of exchange of twice the amount he needed. She 
took an almost indecent delight in entering the bank where 
she kept her funds. There had always been a rapture in 
having money to give away and giving it away, as the princes 
and princesses of the theater tossed off long purses of stage 
gold to beggars. 

But now she felt an abrupt change in herself. Her soul 
was shocked as with an earthquake. Giving money away 
was, after all, only a foolish selfishness. It was not an act of 
generosity and grace, but a kind of blatant boastfulness, 
cheap sentimentalism, destructive to the higher morals. She 
felt the grandeur of the withheld gesture, the resisted im¬ 
pulse ; the fine modesty and wisdom of caution. 

To say, “No!”•—after all, how much bigger a thing than 
to say, “Yes!” To save money was, after all, like saving 
a child. She who had hated the New England ideals of 
thrift and providence and the chill mottoes about “a penny 
saved, a penny earned” understood now the splendid rock- 
ribbed vigor of such an attitude. She was reverting to her 
ancestry. 

She took the first step toward becoming a miser, and it 
led her on and on as the first step toward careless ex¬ 
travagance led the generous heart to the debtors’ prison. 

The bank did not see her that day. She was busy writing 
her husband a letter telling him that she could not send any¬ 
thing at the moment, as his funds were tied up in invest¬ 
ments which ought not to be disturbed. To salve the wound 
she added words of unwonted affection and urged him to 
come to America. Misers are usually spendthrift of kindly 
expressions, warm regrets, and good counsel. Spendthrifts 
of money are usually sheepish, stammering, and full of 
apology. 

The answer to Betty’s beautiful letter was a missive of 
amazement. Jumel repeated that he had to have eight thou¬ 
sand francs. As Betty figured it, that amounted to fifteen 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


284 

hundred dollars, and it was too much to waste on paying 
debts, especially to foreigners. 

Some of the packets were taking only twenty-two days 
now to cross the ocean and Jumel grew frantic when, after 
waiting nearly two months for his money, he received 
another tender denial. 

He wrote again confessing that he had to sell some of 
the table silver to pay his rent, and clamoring for money: 
“Be good enough then for the love of God to send it to me/’ 

The wanton Betty of old was so much changed that she 
answered like a stepmother, with a vicious sweetness: 

“I have done everything in my power to procure money 
for you, but it was impossible, money being scarce, but since 
we have a house at Mount de Marsan, wouldn't it be better 
to sacrifice that, rather than what we have left here for old 
age?” 

Betty talking of old age! Betty patronizing the great 
merchant in his financial agony and counseling him as if he 
were a foolish lad! Money was indeed scarce. The year 
had been full of panics, of runs on honest banks, of scan¬ 
dalous failure among spurious banks, of crashing insurance 
companies, and the sending of several prominent citizens to 
the penitentiary. 

Yet a little later Betty’s excuse is the opposite: it would 
be a mistake to sell their New York property, because of 
its rapid increase in value. The town had already grown 
so fast that it had 180,000 inhabitants. In the election of 
the year before, 21,000 men had been qualified to vote. 
Streets formerly given over to residences, like Wall Street, 
Pearl, and Broadway, were almost monopolized by shops. 
New streets were being opened, old streets stretched out and 
leveled. Broadway was paved and lighted with gas and 
many public buildings and shops enjoyed this new illuminant. 
As the city guide announced, “the effect it has upon the eye 
of a stranger is as novel as it is gratifying, and forms one 
of the principal modem improvements.” Gas cost a dollar 
a foot, but “the cleanliness, the beauty, and the convenience 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 285 

over any other light is the principal cause of its being 
preferred without reference to expense.” 

There were fifteen miles of pipe already laid down from 
the gas works, a noble brick structure which made one of 
the most interesting sights in the city—almost as interesting 
as the new Treadmill where a water-wheel six feet in 
diameter furnished exercise and repentance to the inmates 
of the Penitentiary hard by the Almshouse, near the East 
River. 

The city now covered a space three miles long and a mile 
and a half wide. It was eight miles around. Broadway 
was two miles long from the Battery out to Tenth Street. 
The barbarous system of numbering streets and avenues had 
been adopted for the outlying regions into which the city 
might some day penetrate. A rigid system of parallel streets 
running northerly and called “avenues” was laid out and 
numbered. Across them ran numbered streets called 
streets.” These roads paid no heed to the landscape, but 
forged straight ahead; thus, as a critic of the day complained, 
“giving a tiresome uniformity to the aspect of the modem 
part of the city and causing an immense expense to be in¬ 
curred in counteracting the uncommon asperities and rugged 
inequalities of the surface; and the island has already re¬ 
ceived that impress which will continue to the latest 
posterity.” 

The Third Avenue was already leveled for six miles. The 
Fifth and some of the other avenues were opened in part. 
Lots were bringing as high as $700 near the City Hall, 
diminishing to $60 as you went out into the thinly settled 
portions. New York was bound to thrive. Betty felt that 
it would be criminal to sell New York property in order to 
redeem investments in an outworn city like Paris. 

To make sure that Jumel should not succeed in his de¬ 
mented ideas, Betty transferred out of his reach all his 
property except one tract of unimproved ground. She did not 
put it in her own name, but in that of her adopted daughter, 
Mary, the revenue alone accruing to Betty. This would 
not only thwart Jumel in case he tried to wrest it back, 


286 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


but would foil his heirs in France in case he died. The 
mansion itself was now in the name of Mary Bownes and 
Betty moved back into it. 

In time Jumel, having failed to accomplish anything by 
letters, came* over in person. Betty greeted him with a 
warmth that froze him. He had only to examine the docu¬ 
ments to see that he was landless and helpless, bankrupt 
on two continents. 

He was permitted to have a room in the mansion, but he 
was stupid company, and the winter was as cold as Betty’s 
love. 

She took Mary to the South and left her husband and her 
coachman to entertain each other. Jumel told the coachman 
what a fool he had been to give his wife a power of attorney 
to destroy him with. 

His splendid energy was gone; he was only a poor rela¬ 
tion now; and the smile that had greeted every unfortunate 
with prompt pity was constant now upon his old lips for 
that genial imbecile, himself. 

He hung about the place for four years while Betty ranged 
from Virginia to Saratoga. He amused himself by work¬ 
ing with the farmers who tilled some of his wife’s estates, 
and one summer’s day as he rode on a hay cart on the King’s 
Bridge Road he fell off and was badly hurt. 

He was carried hastily to the mansion and a physician 
called. The physician bled the old man and then bandaged 
him up and left him in his wife’s care to recover. 

The story was told about town that Mary, who loved 
her adopted father dearly, wept so hard that Madame Jumel 
ordered her to leave the room and not come back. 

Some hours later Betty appeared at the door of the sick 
chamber and announced that her husband had died. The 
gossips said that she had removed the bandage and grimly 
watched him bleed to death. 

New York loved to believe anything atrocious of Betty, 
and this ferocious theory ran like wildfire. It finally 
reached the ears of Betty, who promptly sued a lawyer named 
Connelly for libel and hushed him up. 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 287 

Long afterward, in wrangling with a man whom she 
accused of stealing firewood from her place, she cried: 

“You cut it off my lot!” 

“But you can’t prove it,” said he. 

“No more than Connelly could,” said Madame Jumel. 

And that is true of a multitude of legends that gathered 
about Betty. Fantastic stories seemed to love her and to 
fasten on her as barnacles upon a ship. They could not be 
proved, or disproved. 

In any case, Stephen Jumel was dead, and on the 22d of 
May, 1832, she buried him in the graveyard of St. Patrick’s 
Cathedral, at the corner of Mott and Prince Streets. It was 
now the largest church in town—so big that it was not yet 
finished, though begun in 1815. Jumel was a Catholic and 
she restored him to his faith. 

If he ever did a cruel deed, it is not recorded. He had 
atoned for his early laxity in associating with Betty by giv¬ 
ing her an honest name. He could not ask from Heaven 
any better treatment than he had accorded to those he 
encountered on earth. 

Betty became more grimly the business man than ever. 
Stephen Jumel had left a sister, Madeleine Lazardaire, and 
a brother, Frangois, in France. When they had received 
news of his death they controlled their grief long enough to 
write to Betty inquiring if he had perhaps left them any 
legacy. Betty had controlled her grief for nearly a year 
before she wrote that her great grief had prevented her 
sending the sad news that monsieur their brother had left no 
estate at all. 

And now Betty was free. She had spurned the ladder she 
mounted by, and she stood on the heights, independent, 
alone. 

But she did not enjoy being alone. She had found a young 
lawyer named Nelson Chase whose energy she admired, 
and she arranged his marriage with Mary, shortly after the 
funeral. She rented for them an apartment in Grand Street 
and dwelt with them in it during the cold months when the 
mansion was bleak with snow. 


288 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


To take the place of Mary in her heart and in her arms 
she borrowed a little girl named Mary Marilla Stever from 
her parents and later adopted her. She loved all children 
but her own. 

Stephen Jumel had hardly been entombed a week when the 
cholera appeared in New York. It had been cutting a 
hideous swath about the world and had crept down from 
Canada through Albany. The doctors threw up their hands 
in ignorance. The congregations fell on their knees. Panic 
scattered thousand of the citizens. 

Betty resolved to escape. But her business affairs were 
now so stupendous that she feared to leave them entirely to 
the advice of Mr. Hamilton. Casting about for a lawyer 
who had rarely lost a case, her destiny sent her to the office 
of Aaron Burr. 

Burr, who never walked the street without glancing slyly 
up from under his eyelids to study whether or not a former 
friend would cut him or salute him; Betty, who looked down 
from her carriage with a questioning gaze in which timidity 
put on the guise of bravado—these two looked into each 
other’s eyes, knowing how well each knew the world. 

And now at last the two whom nobody spoke to spoke to 
each other. The universal disfavorites, Burr of the men, 
Betty of the women, tried an alliance. 


CHAPTER XL 


A LWAYS afterward Betty insisted that when Burr 
opened his door to her he “inspired her with something 
like dread.” 

Yet there was also something about Aaron Burr that 
warmed her soul. Even those who hated him kept him 
in their hearts as a kind of pet villain. 

Women either tried to save him or to sin with him. 
And there is, indeed, no attack upon him from a woman’s 
tongue or pen. To the females his soul was as precious as 
it seemed fiendish to less lovable men. An ancient aunt of 
his once seized his hands and pleaded: 

“You have committed a great many sins against God, 
and you killed that great and good man General Hamilton. 
I beseech you to repent and fly to the blood and righteous¬ 
ness of the Redeemer for pardon. I cannot bear to think 
of your being lost, and I often most earnestly pray for your 
salvation.” 

His only answer was to say, “Oh, aunt, don’t feel so 
badly; we both shall meet in heaven yet; meanwhile, may 
God bless you.” 

Another woman wrote him of his mother’s hope for him 
and reminded him that St. Augustine had also been in his 
early days a libertine and an infidel. But Burr only smiled. 

He feared neither God nor man, and once, after listening 
to a sermon full of hell fire, he said, “I think that God is 
a great deal better than people suppose.” 

A whole convention of New York women met and re¬ 
solved to overwhelm his soul by special prayer. Seeing no 
evidence that either Heaven or Burr had heeded them, they 
asked the Reverend Doctor Mathews to try his skill upon 
the man. The parson has told his own story of the encounter 
in his autobiography. 


289 


290 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


Even the clergyman found in the skeptic “an unequalled 
fascination.” Burr talked about the importance of tea as 
if his soul were gf no moment. He was touched by the 
word that a society of ladies had been lobbying for his ad¬ 
vancement to Paradise, but he said, “I fear they are asking 
Heaven for what Heaven has not in store for me.” 

Doctor Mathews fell back upon a reference to Burr’s 
mother. This “shook him like a leaf.” The ruthless clergy¬ 
man ventured to speak of a subject forbidden to Burr’s 
friends—the lost Theodosia. Burr broke down completely, 
beat his breast and groaned: 

“There is a desolation here-” 

Then he flung up his head with his old defiance and 
warned the minister not to torment him further. With all 
courtesy he showed the beaten dominie to the door. 

Once Burr had believed that his slanderers would tire if 
left alone, unanswered. Later he gave them up in despair. 
He would not waste his time denying anything. 

As he said to one woman who asked him if he had really 
been the terrible Lothario they said he was: 

“They say! they say! they say! Ah, my child, those two 
little words have done more harm than all the others. Never 
use them! Never use them!” 

He had loved many and well. Countless anecdotes sur¬ 
round his name. A woman surprised the scent of musk upon 
a letter he was reading. Another found a love lock among 
his papers, and asked, 

“Whose hair is that, Colonel?” 

“It is very pretty hair. It is a lady’s hair.” 

When she persisted in asking whose it was, he rebuked her: 

“Madame, it belonged to a lady who was once under my 
protection; and a woman who has ever been in these arms 
is sacred to me forever.” 

Another charged him with the paternity of her babe. He 
denied this no more than any more harsh impeachment: 

“When a lady does me the honor to name me the father 
of her child, I trust I shall always be too gallant to show 
myself ungrateful for the favor.” 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


291 

In those days he met grandmothers who recalled his far- 
off courtesies. They flung down their pipes and embraced 
him again, while tears lost themselves in the many wrinkles 
that had once lain soft and smooth beneath his lips. 

One blizzardy day found the seventy-year old lawyer in 
a sleigh, ploughing through the snow on a twenty-mile ride 
to an upstate court. When the horses flinched from the gale 
and the driver gave signs of freezing to sleep, Burr stopped 
at a lonely farmhouse and asked for shelter. 

In this home of poverty he found a little plaster bust of 
himself, and it amused him to say to his elderly hostess: 

“What! Have you got that vile traitor here ?” 

The old woman confronted him with fury: 

“Say another word against Aaron Burr and I’ll put you 
out where you came from quicker than you came in.” 

He apologized and did not tell her who he was. 

He loved the old ladies and he sent the penniless girls 
to school, even though people said that he only paid with 
money due to other people for the children that were due 
to him. 

And now he was seventy-eight years old and struggling 
still against debt and dishonor, preparing his briefs by work¬ 
ing all night and all day, living on next to nothing, traveling 
to any distance despite any weather. A wintry journey to 
Albany cost him forty-five hours in stagecoaches and sleighs, 
and he reached the capital neither tired nor sleepy. 

Age had not even chilled his ardor for romance. 

To him came Betty in her carriage. She had been a long 
while in arriving, for she herself was within a year of sixty. 
And now, a rich widow in gorgeous mourning, she floated 
like the sumptuous Delilah into the dusty room where sat 
the withered gallant behind his old baize-covered table. 

Everybody in New York knew Betty Jumel by sight, and 
Colonel Burr, assuming or pretending to believe that he had 
met her, leaped to his feet with his famous grace and told 
her how glad he was to see her again. Betty, who had met 
so many famous men, assumed that this was indeed a re¬ 
newal of an interrupted acquaintance. 


292 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

The old beau and the old belle practiced their rusty graces 
on each other and when Betty begged for the use of Burr’s 
great mind his gallantry put his heart at her service. 

She was strangely fluttered by those eyes of his that 
stripped the years from women as any other garment, those 
eyes that like a wizard’s mirror made them feel themselves 
as young and beautiful as they wanted to be. 

She could hardly stammer through her legal problems. 
But at length she left her papers with him and fled. Burr 
was hot on her heels. He helped her elbow into her chariot, 
bowed low, and murmured a hope of seeing her soon again. 
The four grays pranced on their way as haughtily as if they 
carried Caesar’s wife. 

If Betty was fluttered by the chivalry of the man who 
quickened so many pulses, Burr was fluttered, too. He 
stood on the sidewalk, musing after the vanishing carriage. 

On his table were letters of insolence demanding moneys 
long overdue. He had escaped a cell in the debtors’ prison, 
but only by paying the fee necessary to give him partial 
liberty. He had long been “on the limits” and not permitted 
to wander far. He could not have called on Madame Jumel 
at her remote mansion, but for the benevolent fact that im¬ 
prisonment for debt had been abolished beginning with 
May, 1832. 

What if he should win the interest, the heart—even the 
hand |—of Madame Jumel. He knew of her wealth and of 
her widowhood. She had boasted a little of her money and 
she had sighed rather cleverly, rather provocatively, over the 
loss of her husband and the emptiness of her life. 

It occurred to Burr that if he could only lay his hands 
on her wealth he could manage it to her benefit and, besides, 
pay his debts and gain a beautiful home in which to spend 
the few years remaining to him. He was already seven years 
overdue in his grave. He was more weary than he realized 
of the unseasonable toil in which he spent the days and nights 
that should have been given to repose by a man of his years. 
He had always longed to dwell in that mansion, once known 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 293 

as Washington’s headquarters, now known as the Jumel 
place. He had tried to buy it in the days before the duel. 

Burr loved to be tempted and to yield. The temptation 
to marry Betty was an inspiration. He mumbled his favorite 
oath, “By General Jackson! I’ll do it.” 

For the present he must put the plan in abeyance. Betty 
went at once to Saratoga and would not return until the 
Indian summer filled the air with a belated tenderness, like 
the reawakening love in an old widower’s heart. 

Betty and Mary rode all the way to Ballston behind four 
horses, with four others following as relays. Ballston was 
dull because the fever terror had come from the north and 
few dared go so far. She moved on to Saratoga Springs, 
which was also almost untenanted. She liked the hotel so 
well that she bought it ten minutes after she arrived. She 
sold it later for a neat profit, did canny Betty. 

October and Betty reached New York together, and she 
drove down to see Colonel Burr. She said nothing to the 
Hamiltons about her new lawyer, who had slain the eminent 
founder of the Hamilton family. 

She was delighted to find that Burr had managed her 
affairs better than he usually did his own. She found him 
so witty, so gallant, that her prejudices against him began 
to vanish. At length she cried out: 

“I know Mrs. Hamilton very well. How is it possible 
that you could have killed her husband ?” 

Burr winced. A white blush paled his cheeks. He sighed, 
than explained: 

“I hate apologies and explanations. I make no apology. 
The lottery of life threw me my ticket. My friend Hamilton 
whom I shot is dead. It does not become me to speak in his 
dispraise. I never did. I do not now. If he load followed 
my^ principle the duel would never have taken place. 

“If I had died and Hamilton had lived, what a difference 
it would have made in my fame! Thousands who hated him 
while he was alive canonized him dead—for their own pro¬ 
tection. They would equally have made a saint of me— 


294 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

dead—and sent him into exile with the brand of Cain on 
his brow that I wear now on mine. 

‘‘Cain and Abel fought over a religious detail. If Abel 
had killed Cain, what a difference it would have made! We 
should now remember Cain as the beautiful martyr, and 
Abel would have been the byword of viciousness. 

“Hamilton and I were brother officers—both members of 
Washington’s family. We disagreed on our political re¬ 
ligions. I believed, I believe, in the right of all men to vote, 
and to vote for the President of their country. Hamilton 
abhorred the idea. Though he was born on foreign soil, he 
wrote into the Constitution a clause to enable himself to 
become President, and was never nominated. But I was! 
And I won! I was President of the United States by right 
of a majority of voting members. Yet he conspired against 
me. He left no trick untried. The confessed adulterer 
called me profligate! He called me a complete Catiline! 
Yet I did not kill him then. I let him beat me out of my 
heritage. 

“I believe even in the right of you women to education, to 
freedom from slavery to your husbands, yes, to the privilege 
of voting. Hamilton despised this notion of mine. 

“His motto was, ‘Let us meet art with art and trick with 
trick.’ His first trick was the formation of a Christian Con¬ 
stitutional Society to mask under the name of religion a 
political scheme. 

“But they have elected me the Cain and the Judas Iscariot 
of the country I fought for at the age of nineteen. They 
have elected me lord high profligate. Well, my wife died of 
cancer, my daughter lost her son and, after suffering infernal 
ills, perished in a great tempest. Hamilton married a rich 
woman and was as much a profligate as I. He confessed— 
or boasted—his adultery with Mrs. R.-and named her. 

“If he had done me the favor of killing me he would have 
been hated as the royalist rake who slew Saint Aaron Burr. 
But he had the luck to be killed. They say that he did not 
fire. I heard the bullet whistle. Then they say he fired 
into the tree overhead. How was I to know ? In any case, 



THE GOLDEN LADDER 295 

he could have saved his life by doing me the simple justice 
of withdrawing the slanders he spread about me. 

“They say I have loved women too well. Well, so did 
Hamilton. He inherited his passion from his mother and 
father, who loved each other so intensely that they did not 
wait for marriage. 

“I say this with no disrespect for Hamilton. It speaks 
well for his intelligence that he could not resist the beauty 
of this dismal world. 

“I have loved many, they say. Well, I would not deny 
the charge. I am not infidel enough to scorn God’s master- 
works: a beautiful face, eyes like stars in a mist, mouths 
budding for other lips, a hand to caress and fondle—as I 
kiss this beautiful hand of yours, madame.” 

His gray head was bent over her hand and it tingled under 
his kiss. 

A woman rarely hates a man for having loved many before 
he loved her. Betty had no scruples at all. She melted 
under the flattery in Burrs expertly modulated voice, the 
look in his old eyes, that amorous smile. 

Seeing that she did not snatch her hand away and that her 
gaze was gentle upon him, he drew her hand to his heart. 
This brought her face close to his and his spell was full 
upon her as he murmured: 

“Madame, I respectfully ask you to grant me this hand 
to keep—in marriage.” 

This overwhelmed Betty. To be asked in wedlock by 
any man was an adventure. She had been besought for 
favors by many men, but Burr offered marriage first. And 
was the first to pay her this stupendous compliment. 

As if a shattered rose might recall its petals from the 
ground and be pink again, her tarnished cheeks achieved 
a blush. She snickered like a schoolgirl : 

“Oh, Colonel Burr!” 

“Say that you will marry me !” he pleaded, “and when ?” 

“Why, Colonel Burr! The idea!” 

“Name the day!” 


296 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

But she could only giggle and squirm and he let her go 
when she promised to think it over. 

She rode home in a golden haze. But when she told the 
Chases that she had had a proposal, she was jarred out of 

her dream. , , 

They could not conceal their mixture of horror and 
laughter at the thought of the sixty-year-old Betty marrying 
the seventy-eight-year-old Burr. They plainly regarded it 
as a fantastic comedy marred by indecency. . . 

This was a cruel blow to Betty and it set her to thinking. 
Her first thoughts went to money nowadays. She sobered 
the smiling heirs by the sudden grimness of her glare and 
her cold words: 

“You are afraid that Mr. Burr will get the money you 

have been expecting from me.” 

Mary gasped and blushed. She wondered if she had 
indeed thought of that. She tried to explain away the 

charge, but she could only falter: 

“Mama! I was thinking of what the people in town would 

say of you.” . 

This gave Betty pause and threw her bridal thoughts into 
confusion. The ribald citizens who had mocked her always 
would reel with laughter at the union of its most unpopular 
woman with its most unpopular man, both too old for 
romance. It was a cruel collision with reality. She left the 
presence of the children to be alone with herself. She could 
see about her the averted faces of the New-Yorkers as she 
usually saw them from her carriage. She imagined Burr 
at her side, and now all the faces turned frankly toward her 
with frank and contemptuous laughter. 

They would say that Burr was wise. He had a carriage 
now for his old bones. He had a woman whom even his 
society could not shame. He had receipts for his bills and 
some one to keep him as long as he lasted. He was a great 
lawyer and he had won a great fool for a client. 

There would be contempt in their admiration for Burr, but 
no admiration in their contempt for Betty. If she should 
appear with a young and beautiful bridegroom at her elbow, 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 297 

they would say that she got something for her money at 
least. But poor old Burr! 

Strangely, the thought of the derision of the town woke 
her courage. She had lived and thrived upon hostility. It 
was the element she had swum in all her life. Well, why 
should she swim alone? 

She went to Burr as her lawyer for counsel, not only in 
her real estate, but her spiritual estate. He, too, knew what 
it was to go through life with hatred scowling upon him 
everywhere and all the while. He said: 

“My dear lady, the mockery of the public is no proof of 
one’s own fault. The people crucified Christ, made Socrates 
commit suicide, threatened to hang George Washington. All 
the Jerusalems have always stoned all the prophets. Let 
us go our ways and accept the jeers of the rabble as a 
pleasant music, like the roaring of the surf that gnashes its 
teeth against us yet breaks at our feet. Nothing makes a 
fireside so cozy as the roaring of the wind outside or the 
howls of the wolves. Madame, I can contribute to your 
honorable and comfortable isolation the companionship of 
the most disliked man on this side of the ocean. What more 
congenial company could you have?” 

This heartened her a little, yet it lacked something of 
what is expected from nuptial bliss. There was a distinct 
jangle in such wedding bells. 

She shook her head. Yet when she thrust him away she 
was lonely indeed. 


CHAPTER XLI 


S HE invited Burr to a dinner, a magnificent feast at the 
mansion. She made the place blaze with candles and 
twinkling prisms. She had caused little mirrors to be set 
along the baseboard to increase the radiance and reflect the 
trains of the gowns. She donned the finest laces that needles 
ever spun. On her finger she put the emerald rings that 
Josephine had worn upon her bare toes before she knew 
Napoleon. She put on her head the diadem of sapphires that 
Josephine wore when she was empress. 

She sat in a chair that had embraced Washington when 
he was a general under this same roof and flew his early 
flag on the staff outside; the chair that upheld Lieutenant- 
General Sir Henry Clinton when he possessed the house after 
the British had scattered Washington’s men as a wintry wind 
blows autumn leaves away; the chair that upheld Lieutenant- 
General Baron von Knyphausen when he made the mansion 
his headquarters and filled the yard with the yammer of his 
Hessian peasants. 

Her chair had indeed been reoccupied by Washington when 
he came back as President and on a July afternoon in 1790 
gave a noble dinner, which he recorded in his diary, to 

a party consisting of the Vice-President and his lady, son and 
Mrs. Smith, to the Secretaries of State, Treasury, and War, and 
the ladies of the two latter, with all the gentlemen of my family, 
Mrs. Lear and the two children ... at the house lately Colonel 
Roger Morris’, but confiscated and in the possession of a com¬ 
mon farmer. 

John Adams was the Vice-President then and his wife was 
Abigail. Later Adams was President. Alexander Hamil¬ 
ton was the Secretary of the Treasury and his widow had 

298 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 299 

often told Betty of that feast served by Mr. Marriner, a 
dauntless whaleboat fighter in the war and later a famous 
tavern-keeper. 

And now it was fitting that Colonel Burr should be the 
guest of honor, for he would have been the President of the 
United States if he had not been cheated of his dues. 

She gave him what splendor she could and she gathered a 
company of people who were so distinguished that they were 
not afraid to be seen in such company. 

Colonel Burr was the most brilliant figure in that brilliant 
throng. And the mansion was worthy of him or anyone. 
Had not the former king of Spain eaten in the kitchen? 
Did she not now display to some of her guests, who ven¬ 
tured into the house for the first time, its amazing treasures ? 

Here were eight chairs that had belonged to Napoleon 
when he was only the First Consul. There was a marble- 
topped table he brought from his invasion of Egypt. That 
clock which chimed had tinkled in his ears from the palace 
of the Tuileries. The gleaming chandelier overhead was one 
he had sent to General Moreau before they turned against 
each other. In the cabinet yonder was Napoleon’s chess¬ 
board and the ivory pieces he designed, with his own cocked 
hat upon them. His army chest sat in a corner. A bed he 
had slept on was upstairs, and in the barn was his carriage. 

When Betty, a little boastfully, pointed these out to Burr, 
he told her of the hideous months he had spent in Paris 
trying to meet Napoleon for half an hour; of his starvation, 
his cold, his endless humiliations. 

“You, madame, have brought me nearer to Napoleon than 
I ever came in Paris. I have at least touched the furniture 
that he once warmed. He is cold enough now. Or is he 
warm? At any rate, madame, you and I live and he is— 
where ?” 

When the dinner was served and she indicated him as her 
escort, she noted that his grace was equal to that of any of 
the princes of France who had lifted her fingers on the backs 
of their hands at the court banquets of Paris. And his 
words were exquisite: 


3 oo THE GOLDEN LADDER 

“I give you my hand, madame; my heart has long been 

yours.” f , 

The dinner was in the early dusk for the sake ot the 
candles. Betty looked better at candle-lighting time than 
in the mean stare of the sun. After the dinner there was 
moonlight upon the great piazza. Stars spangled the sky, 
silver rivers went winding through the dark lands, and far 
off to the south was the gleam of New York like a hostile 
and beleaguered city. 

Long after the last guest had driven away into the beauty 
of the night Burr lingered and filled Betty’s ears with 
felicitous words. When he went at last she stood and 
listened to the hoofs of his horse as they drummed the dust 
Then she hurried to the stairs like a girl and had climbed 
halfway before the years overtook her and made the last 
steps tedious. She staggered to a window and out upon a 
balcony where Washington had often stood and swept the 
British lines with his field-glass. 

There Betty watched for the form of Burr darkling in the 
trees about the winding road. She fancied that she could see 
him and she waved her scarf at him: 

“In such a night 

Stood Dido with a willow in her hand 

Upon the wild sea-banks, and waved her love 

To come again to Carthage.” 

A longing and a loneliness made her heart ache blissfully 
as with a sad-sweet music. She could not believe that she 
and age had had any traffic together, or that the years had 
trampled her at all. Blotted in the blue wonder of the moon- 
night she was again the beautiful, the tall blond blue-eyed 
girl who came hunting romance in the little city of then. 

The next night Burr rode out to call upon her. They 
dallied together over the dinner and the wine, and to escape 
the staring eyes and the embarrassing embarrassment of 
Mary and her husband she led him into the gardens. 

They sat on the edge of the fish pond overtowered by 
great African cypress trees that had been born in Egypt, 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 301 

if one can trust the legend that the khedive had sent to 
Napoleon the roots of four hundred cypresses in native soil 
fastened each in its canvas bag. The mournful things had 
arrived in Paris as Napoleon drooped. They lay neglected 
in the gardens of the Tuileries till Jumel saw them and 
bought them and sent them on one of his ships to this 
mansion. 

Betty and Burr under these Egyptian branches were in the 
mood of Cleopatra and Antony. And after all, Cleopatra 
was nearly forty and Antony past fifty at the height of their 
immortal romance. 

As Betty and Burr leaned over and gazed down at their 
images in the fish pond, its blurred mirror gave back images 
of flattery. The air was drugged with tenderness. He held 
her hand and drew her to him, and it would have been 
sacrilege to profane that night with resistance. 

The day after she went to his office. On another evening 
they visited the Park Theater to see Charles Kemble and 
his fascinating daughter Fanny—the great sensations of the 
time; they took in twelve hundred dollars nearly every night! 
To avoid the late long drive to the mansion, Betty rested 
at the City Hotel. Burr and she had breakfast together; 
and on another day they were seen at Sandy Welsh’s Terra¬ 
pin Lunch. They even went together to the Rotunda, where 
there was a painting representing Adam and Eve almost 
unclothed. It was the town scandal next to the association 
of the Burr scoundrel and the Jumel woman. 

But Betty was so intent upon his amazingly interesting 
eyes that she did not notice whether or not the dull eyes of 
the public were on them. In fact, the town was ringing 
with the scandal. Gossip woke into a new life. Everybody 
seeing Burr and Betty together suspected the worst possible. 
But they had the advantage of their ostracism. The gossip 
did not reach their ears out at the mansion where they played 
many games of whist. 

Betty’s soul longed for repose in those arms of Burr’s. 
What if they had embraced a legion of women? Her own 
arms were not quite ignorant; they had not been idle always. 


302 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

Aged as she was, she felt a longing to nestle toward this 
one man who paid her homage. It might be their second 
childhood, yet they were, after all, but Babes in the Wood, 
lost in the black forest with night drawing on. 

In his office one day she looked at Burr with a plaintive 
smile that said, “Yes,” but her head wagged a timid, “No.” 
He seized her hand, kissed it again and again and said: 

“It is not like my brave Betty to let cowardice stand in 
the way of her happiness.” 

He drew her toward him till the sharp corner of the 
baize-covered table cut into her breast. He hitched his 
chair nearer and slowly moved closer and closer, like a more 
ancient serpent charming an ancient Eve. 

Her mouth that had once been bee-stung and honeyed for 
kisses forgot its age. Her bosom remembered when it was 
high and firm and ambrosial. Her eyes were near enough 
to see him plain, though desire enhanced him with a flatter¬ 
ing haze. 

Burr was all himself again and his murmured compliments, 
his beseeching eyes, his pointed lips commanded her. 

The twain were not old in their own eyes. If there had 
been an observer he would have laughed at the senile 
burlesque, but a merciful illusion is left to the aged whereby 
they can surround themselves with moonlight and music and 
all witchery. The crone can lean across an imagined ledge 
in Verona and coo: “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, 
Romeo?” And the rheumatic veteran can scale the vine- 
clad balcony and, seeing the vague hag above him, murmur : 
“It is the East, and Juliet is the sun!” 

So Aaron Burr spun such a wizardry about the hungry 
soul of Betty that she leaned into his arms and flung hers 
about him. And they kissed and kissed again. But both, 
being not altogether mad, kept their eyes shut tight. 


CHAPTER XLII 


O HE would and she wouldna’! 

^ While Betty swooned upon the heart of Burr she felt 
herself another Lilith, and Paradise regained. 

But when her unpracticed arms wearied all too soon of 
clutching Burr, and when her shortened breath gave out in 
the clench of his embrace, and when she had opened her eyes 
again, she found herself in no embowered Eden with an 
Adam fresh from the Creator’s hand. She found herself 
ih a lawyer’s office with her taffeta pretty well mussed and 
her hat askew. 

Burr had no illusions to recover from. When he embraced 
Betty he embraced a large sack of money in female form. 
If it had been love he wanted there was a widow far younger, 
plumper, more desirable than Betty who adored him and 
whom he adored. But that widow had no money. This 
widow was a gold mine. He could have called her Golconda. 

It maddened him to have Golconda rise, tear herself free 
from his hands, and bolt for the door. He just managed 
to overtake her there before she escaped, and brace himself 
against it to check her flight. 

She was so shaken with her long unsuspected ability to 
glow with love that she wanted to be alone with her happi¬ 
ness, like a delighted virgin stricken into a panic by her 
first kiss. 

Burr pleaded for a “Yes,” and for a definite day when he 
might call her his. But she could only plead and stammer: 

“Oh, let me go, Mr. Burr! Please, Mr. Burr, dear Mr. 
Burr. There, I have kissed you. You must! If I kiss you 
again will you let me go ? I did kiss you, but you don’t keep 
your promise. Well, one more. No, not another. Oh— 
oh, Mr. Burr-urr-urr!” 


303 


3 04 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

He crushed her against the door as if he would fasten 
her there in alto relievo. Then he said: 

“I see you are afraid to go to church with me. So I will 
bring the church to you, Madame Mohammed. I will call 
upon you with a parson and—well, you had best not defy 
Aaron Burr, madame.” 

He escorted her to her carriage, kissed her hand, and 
whispered : 

“Madame Burr, my heart rides with you!” 

Betty’s carriage jounced her all the way from Burr’s 
office out Broadway to Tenth, where the paving stopped, on 
past the Madison Cottage at the lane that some fantastic 
optimist had named Twenty-third Street in the hope of 
deluding some foolish purchaser to believe that it would 
some day be valuable. She never once noticed whether she 
were snubbed or not. In fact, several people tried to speak 
to her, and she gazed at them as if they were swirls of dust 
in the road. Who were they, anyway? Had not the Vice- 
President of the United States just implored her to be his 
bride ? 

What was the title for the wife of a Vice-President? 
They spoke of the mayor’s wife as the mayoress. Would 
she not be the Vice-Presidentess ? What would the word be ? 


CHAPTER XLIII 


B URR’S head was swimming a bit when he left Betty. 

He tried the case before himself, then rose, swung his 
high hat on his head, and visited the last person he could have 
been expected to call upon—a clergyman. He selected one 
who had known him long enough and well enough to have 
lost the ability to be shocked by anything he did. 

He had called upon this same pastor for this same purpose 
just fifty-one years before. The Rev. David Schuyler 
Bogart of the Dutch Reformed Church had married Burr 
to Theodosia Prevost in 1782. He had lived to be asked to 
marry him to Betty Jumel in 1833. He did not decline 
the call. 

On the first day of July he lifted his aged frame into old 
Colonel Burr’s old gig and set out on the hot dusty drive 
to Washington Heights. 

What followed has been told and disputed and told again. 
Almost everything imaginable about Betty has been asserted 
and denied. But the legend or the fact is that Betty was 
so startled by Burr’s appearance with the parson that she 
fled upstairs, because neither her body nor her heart was 
dressed for the occasion. 

Burr vowed that he would keep the siege till she sur¬ 
rendered. Mary Chase and her husband, repentant perhaps 
of their first response to Betty’s romance, went up and im¬ 
plored her to yield; knelt down and begged her to accept 
the aid of her brilliant suitor. It was an hour and a half 
before at last she weakened, embraced Mary, and cried 
‘‘Then I will sacrifice myself for your sakes!” 

Mary ran to the wardrobe and hauled down a lavender 
silk richly trimmed with lace of famous lineage. When 
Betty was dight she swept down the stairway, where Burr 
met her and escorted her to the tea room. Then she put 

305 


306 the golden ladder 

her hand in his, accepted the ring he slid along her finger, 
and bowed to the uplifted palm of Doctor Bogart. 

Eight servants, peering over railings and through windows 
and doors, were the only guests ; and the young Chases were 
the witnesses. 

Having now added “Mrs. Burr” to her catalogue of titles, 
Betty ordered the feast prepared. The wine cellar was 
rifled and venerable spiders were frightened from the thick 
webs they and their forespiders had wound about old bottles. 

The parson is reported to have been so saturated with 
liquor almost as old as himself that he grew very jolly and 
was sent back to town singing. 

The story goes that Burr clasped the hand of his Eliza 
and said: 

“Madame, the Americans will fear me more than ever, 
now that two such brains as yours and mine are united.” 

This sounds unlike him, but the wine was classic enough to 
furnish its own grandiloquence. 

Who could write an endurable epithalamium for such a 
bridal bed? To perfect the story, an eclipse is assigned to 
that momentous night. The mischievous Luna might well 
have veiled her face before such a honeymoon, and litera¬ 
ture may well follow her example in the chronicle of the 
unimaginable consummation of that unholy sacrament. 

The most charming legends, alas! are always at the mercy 
of the most insulting documents, though legends generally 
survive in spite of grossly contradictory facts. 

So let the pretty chronicle remain as the public likes it, 
and forget such dismaying statements as this, which was 
forwarded to me by Mr. Thomas Beer, who copied it from a 
letter in his possession: 

257 Grand Street 
October j, 1859 

Mr. Linus Baldwin, 

Pittsburgh, Penn’a. 

Sir : 

Repeating formally the substance of our conversation at Mr. 
Choate’s, I assert that on the morning of his wedding Aaron 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 307 

Burr appeared at Mr. Leaventritt’s office in Chambers Street 
with Mrs. Jumel and received from her the sum of forty five 
thousand dollars in currency and gold, taking a receipt in dupli¬ 
cate, both copies witnessed by myself, by Oliver Jennings of 
this city and by George Leaventritt, now deceased. It was 
understood by all present and so stated that this payment was 
part of the contract of marriage between Mr. Burr and Mrs. 
Jumel. On this occasion Mr. Burr treated her with much rude¬ 
ness so that Mr. Jennings and myself exclaimed at him. I am 
not further able to assist you in prosecuting your claims against 
Mr. Burr’s estate. Mr. Morton Phillips of the Chemist’s Bank 
might have more information as to the funds. 

I am, sir, y’rs, 

George Chambers. 

How shall we ever know the true truth of this alliance? 
The Evening Post published only two lines about it: 

On Monday evening last, at Harlaem Heights, by the Rev. 
Dr. Bogart, Col. Aaron Burr to Mrs. Eliza Jumel. 

And Philip Hone, who had twice been mayor of New 
York, wrote in his diary: 

Wednesday, July 3d, 1833 . The Celebrated Col. Burr was 
married on monday evening to the equally celebrated mrs. Jumel, 
widow of Stephen Jumel. It is benevolent in her to keep the 
old man in his latter days. One good turn deserves an other. 

Yet one church historian says that Betty and Burr met 
at a church where they were both communicants, and another 
historian says that Betty and Burr lived together more before 
the marriage than ever afterward; and a third historian 
declares on the authority of “one who has a better right than 
anybody else living to be conversant with the facts of the| case 
—that Madame Jumel had never met, or ever seen. Colonel 
Burr until the day of her visit to his office.” 

Surely in all these versions there should be one to suit 
the personal taste of any reader. Let each select his own. 

However well the town laughed at the Harlem romance, 


3 o8 the golden ladder 

it is averred that one woman, younger and fairer far than 
Betty, learned with horror that another had captured the 
Aaron Burr whom she had expected to wed; and wept 
bitterly in her fierce anger. 

Whether Betty wept or not is not recorded; but there 
are evidences enough of her prompt post-nuptial wrath. 


CHAPTER XLIV 


p' OR a few days the gray doves kept to the cote and let 
A the town simmer and subside. 

Then they set out on a honeymoon tour to Connecticut, 
where a nephew of Burr’s was Governor. They were re¬ 
ceived with distinction. 

Burr, learning that Betty owned some stock in the Hart¬ 
ford Bridge, advised her to sell it and invest the proceeds 
in real estate. A purchaser was speedily found, who 
proffered Betty six thousand dollars. With a wifely meek¬ 
ness she was proud of, Betty said: 

“Pay it to my husband. After this he will manage my 
affairs.” 

Burr accepted the large package and had it sewed inside 
the lining of his coat in various spots. The padding was said 
to have improved his gaunt figure so considerably that when 
he reached New York his enhanced condition was remarked 
upon. 

When he felt it safe to extract the funds, he deposited 
them in his own bank in his own name. 

Burr’s heart had ever been turned to the great South¬ 
west, and the failure of his vast empire in that quarter had 
never ceased to distress him. He heard of a plan to settle 
a colony of German immigrants in the Mexican state of 
Texas. It was as iridescent as the Mississippi Bubble. 
Burr piled into it all the money he had, overlooking the detail 
that part of it belonged to his wife; or, at least, it had 
belonged to Madame Jumel. 

He was so thrilled by his rekindled hopes of Southwestern 
power and so absorbed in the Texan excitement that he 
neglected to consult his bride or even to take the long ride 
to the mansion. His bride missed him. Then she missed 

309 


3 io THE GOLDEN LADDER 

her money. It might have been hard for her to say at that 
moment in her change of soul which she resented the more, 
the deprivation of her bridegroom or of her cash. 

She sent young Mr. Chase to inquire about her six thou¬ 
sand dollars. Burr was angered by this communication and 
sent her word that she had a husband now and her affairs 
were his, although his were none of hers. 

Her famous carriage came again to Burr’s office. The 
very horses trotted with a menacing tread. She swept into 
his room, and found his courteous bow less fascinating than 
hitherto. 

“My money!” she said. “Where is my money ?” 

“In Texas,” said Burr. 

When she grew threatening, he reminded her of the law. 
He believed in educating women, but he did not believe that 
they were yet ready to overturn the law he practiced. He 
spread open a copy of Blackstone and read to her: 

“The husband and wife are one, and that one is the 
husband.” 

When she cried out in protest at this he opened Kent’s 
Commentaries and read: 

“The husband and wife are regarded as one person, and 
her legal existence and authority lost or suspended during 
the continuance of the matrimonial union.” 

Having tasted the new wine of independence and of finan¬ 
cial success, Betty was fairly infuriated at such injustice. 
She felt herself trapped, robbed of her soul. 

Burr smiled: “Be calm, my dear. You are sub potestate 
viri, feme covert and various other terrible things. You are 
‘under the power and protection,’ ‘the dominion and con¬ 
trol,’ of your husband. It is fortunate that you have so 
devoted a master.” 

“Where is my money ? Give it back to me or I’ll sue you 
for it.” 

“You have, my dear, no legal existence until my death 
releases you. You then become a soul again.” 

She glared at him so balefully that he laughed: 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


3ii 

“You are hoping that I shall die soon. But your com¬ 
panionship gives me a new lease on existence.” 

‘Til divorce you, you’ll see!” 

“In case of divorce, if I am not guilty—and I shall not be 
—you would be left penniless, because all your money is now 
mine, my dear life, my new life.” 

Lashed to a frenzy by his sarcasm and the feel of the 
chains he had thrown about her, she paced the floor in a fury, 
her brief love blazing into a white hate. 

He tried to appease her by telling her of the vast profits 
to be made by the Texas land scheme as soon as the German 
immigrants could be turned thither. He doubtless expected 
to prove his devotion by his success. New riches would 
atone for his speculation. But the fates still taunted him. 
The forlorn gambler was dismayed by the prompt collapse 
of his second empire. The Germans declined to go to Texas 
and the courts decided that the company had no title to the 
land. Betty’s money was gone, and Burr’s own money with 
it; the bubble was air again. 

Burr had not the courage to take the news to Betty. She 
read it in the papers and almost suffocated with the after- 
math of her marriage. For a long time the twain did not 
meet. But it was not in Burr’s nature to live without the 
companionship of woman. 

Many gentle souls who had hated Betty for stealing their 
Aaron Burr took him back into their hearts. Betty heard 
of his communions and sulked at a distance. She went to 
him to berate him and fell into his arms. They returned to 
the mansion for five weeks. 

He wheedled more money out of her to recoup his losses. 
The devil was after him; he lost everything she intrusted 
to him. She would trust him no more with either cash or 
caresses. He went back to his wonted consolers. Then his 
sins or his misfortunes fell upon him in an avalanche. 

Late in the winter of 1833, while passing the City Hotel 
with another man, he hobbled a moment, then caught his 
friend by the arm in sudden pain and helplessness. He 
leaned against the hotel wall until a hackney coach could be 


312 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

found. He got into it with difficulty and got out of it with 
more difficulty at his office. A doctor fetched in haste made 
no delay in his verdict: 

“Paralysis !” 

The defiant Burr denied this charge with all his soul, but 
he could not walk. 

When the news of the blow reached Betty she sent her 
horses galloping to Nassau Street and ran to the side of 
her stricken husband, wept upon him, and sobbed: 

“Come home!” 

She took him out to the mansion and had him stretched 
on a red-velvet sofa that had belonged to Napoleon. She 
kept the fire warm in the drawing-room where Burr lay, and 
nursed him tenderly. A month of care made him well 
enough to return to his office, to his speculations with her 
money and what fees he could collect—and to his flirtations. 

Then Betty grew frenzied. She went back to the office of 
Alexander Hamilton, junior, and ordered him to sue Burr 
for divorce. She insisted on paying the old gentleman of 
seventy-nine the superb compliment of charging him with 
infidelity. With splendid generosity she named half a dozen 
corespondents! 

The case gave the town a glorious laughter. Then the 
law’s delay intervened. 

A few months more and the lightning smote Burr anew. 
Even he must confess that this was indeed paralysis. But 
the lightning of forgiveness did not strike Betty’s heart 
again. It was left for another woman to take the Colonel to 
her boarding house, the old home of Governor Jay, where 
the old butler of Governor Clinton waited on him. Here he 
lay for two years as an unpaying guest. When certain pros¬ 
pective boarders refused to dwell under the same roof with 
Burr, his devotee showed them the door. 

The face of Betty never brightened the room, but the 
portrait of Theodosia hung where he could gaze upon it 
with recurrent tears. While he lay there the newspapers 
told of the war for freedom from Mexico waged by the 
settlers in Texas. He cried: 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


3i3 

“You see! I was right, but thirty years too soon! What 
was treason in me then is patriotism now!” 

In a little greater calm even than that with which he had 
met all of life’s harsh dealings with him, Burr accepted help¬ 
lessness. About his bed a few faithful cronies gathered to 
receive more courage and cheer than they brought. 

Once when the warm heart that gave him a home bewailed 
a great loss and cried: “How shall I get through this ?” he 
answered, “Live through it, my dear.” And when she 
moaned, “But it will kill me,” he pleaded: “Well, die then, 
madame. We must all die; but, bless me, let us die game.” 

Whenever a woman was friendly with Burr the town pro¬ 
claimed her either one of his countless mistresses or one of 
his countless daughters. And so his hostess told him: 

“Colonel, they say I’m your daughter.” 

“Well, we don’t care for that, do we?” 

“Not a bit! But others say I was your mistress.” 

“Do they? I don’t think we care much for that, either, 
do we? But I’ll tell you something they might say of you 
that would be true, ‘She gave the old man a home when no¬ 
body else would.’ ” 

With a palsied hand he lifted her hand to his lips. 

By and by the relentless progress of the growing city 
brought about the demolition of the Jay House, and Burr 
was removed to Staten Island. A clergyman visited him 
often and was courteously received, but had little reward in 
the way of saving his soul. He praised the Bible as “the 
most perfect system of truth the world has even seen,” but 
when he was asked as to his hopes of redemption through 
Christ’s suffering, he said with deep solemnity: 

“On that subject I am coy.” 

A few weeks before his death he appeared by attorney, 
Charles O’Connor, in the Court of Chancery to answer 
Betty’s plea for divorce. A few days before his death the 
decree was granted against him. He made only the formal 
opposition necessary to enable Betty to secure the decree. 
Since in the infinite wisdom of our lawmakers, divorce is 
forbidden to any couple if both want it, he pretended to 


314 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

oppose it. And since in New York adultery was the only 
permissible excuse for divorce, he let that charge go by 
default. It was his final gallantry. Chancellor Kent signed 
a decree that gave Betty her entire property. 

It made little difference. Burr was about to be divorced 
from all humanity. His one concern seemed to be that his 
patriotism should be remembered: 

“If they persist in saying that I was a bad man, they 
shall admit that I was a good soldier. Death has no terrors 
for me.” 

They have persisted in saying that he was a bad man. 
They have neglected to recall his military valor. 

On the 14th of September, 1836, he was prayed for by the 
faithful clergyman, Doctor Vanpelt. He lifted a feeble hand 
to the spectacles that seemed to irk him. His friend asked 
if he wanted them removed. He nodded. She lifted them 
away and his eyes gleamed with their ultimate flare as he 
sighed: 

“Madame-” 

But he did not refer to Madame Jumel Burr. 

“The last audible word whispered by the dying man,” says 
Parton, “was the one, of all others in the language, the 
most familiar to his lips.” 

He had asked to be taken back to Princeton and buried 
at the feet of his grandfather and his father, both of them 
presidents of the college. This wish was granted him. A 
body of volunteers fired over his grave a military salute; and 
mourning was worn for him for thirty days by a solemn 
group of students who kept up the Cliosophic Society of 
which he had been one of the founders. 

One of his last requests was that his friend should look 
to the welfare of a daughter of his, then a little girl of 
eight. He mentioned her in a will he left. The will seemed 
to be all he left. But a reversionary interest in some for¬ 
gotten property of his surprised the girl long after with a 
posthumous gift from the man of so many beautiful and re¬ 
proachful gifts. 

Mysteriously, an unknown friend placed over his grave, 



THE GOLDEN LADDER 


3i5 

two years after his death, a block of marble carrying his 
name, his dates and the legend, “A Colonel in the Army of 
the Revolution. Vice-President of the United States from 
1801 to 1805.” 

Epitaphs enough were written for him. The newspapers 
scourged his memory. He was not forgiven even in his 
grave, and few men have had more vigorous denunciation 
than he, alive or dead. 

The greatest height of abuse was reached by a clergy¬ 
man, who summed him up in an article in the New York Re¬ 
view, and composed a masterpiece of gentle understanding 
and Christian charity, his only difficulty being the rivalry 
between his hatred of Burr and his abomination of Thomas 
Jefferson. 

As an example of the spirit of the times and the art of 
making a fiend out of a man, a few phrases may be culled. 
If anyone thinks that this book should contain a reproof of 
Burr’s imperfections, these words will suffice for that pur¬ 
pose, too. Coming from a clergyman, they may also justify 
this book a little: 

There are two classes of men, the study of whose lives is 
especially profitable. These are the signally good, and the re¬ 
markably bad. The fearless delineation of vice may, by the 
force of contrast, beget disgust; and as the drunkenness of the 
Helot was made to minister a lesson of sobriety to the Spartan 
youth, so may men gather admonitions to virtue from the bold 
exhibition of human profligacy. . . . Let us know truly what our 
fathers did, in any and every way, in the perilous strife that 
gave us independence. . . . Let not biography become worse 
than worthless, by degenerating into mere eulogy; let facts be 
related as they were, and let it be left to our hearts to render 
the appropriate tribute to virtue, or to glow with honest indig¬ 
nation at the spectacle of vice. . . . 

If piety were an inheritable quality, Aaron Burr would have 
been a very holy man. His father was a clergyman, and his 
mother was the daughter of a clergyman; both these gentlemen 
were men of high and deserved reputation; indeed, no divine 
of this country has been more distinguished than his maternal 
grandfather, Jonathan Edwards. The piety of his mother, too, 


3 i6 the golden ladder 

was exemplary. It was his misfortune, early in life, to lose 
both his parents, and from the account before us, we cannot > 
but conclude that he fell into hands incompetent to the manage¬ 
ment of a high-spirited, self-willed, and resolute boy; for such 
was his character. ... 

From the autumn of 1773 to the spring of the next year, he 
occupied himself, from sixteen to eighteen hours a day, in read- 
ing on religious subjects; when, as he stated himself, he reached 
the belief “that the road to Heaven was open to all alike”; and 
thence seems, from the testimony of his future life, to have 
deduced the very illogical conclusion, that because the road was 
thus open, there was no necessity to trouble himself with a 

journey upon it. . . . . 

It was in the army, probably, that he acquired that 
wonderful self-possession in which no man excelled him; it 
was a plant that found a congenial soil in his self-esteem. 
Systematically profligate in his intercourse with the other sex, 
the unblushing slave of passion, and glorying in his shame, he 
was not likely, in the camp, to learn a lesson of virtuous re¬ 
straint; while the secrecy of purpose, often indispensable in a 
commander on duty, doubtless strengthened an unfortunate 
natural tendency, exhibited from a very early period of life, to 
conceal his private designs and doings, however unimportant, in 


a covering of mystery. . . . 

Aaron Burr had commenced the work of his own ruin before 
he was made Vice-President. Had he been, in the former part 
of his life, true to honour, true to virtue, true to himself, such 
a creature as Thomas Jefferson was, never could have ruined 
him. Could Jefferson, by any conceivable effort of his malig¬ 
nity, have ruined such men as George Washington, and John 
Jay, and John Marshall, and Timothy Pickering, and Fisher 
Ames? No, verily. He had malice enough to give them an 
occasional blow in the dark, but he had also cunning enough to 
know that the viper bit the file in vain. . . . 

Whether Aaron Burr was guilty of treason or not, is a ques¬ 
tion which we cannot undertake to answer with certainty. . . . 
But when we turn to the history of his trial, we say, that as his 
guilt was far from being palpable, such was the vindictive spirit 
with which the President sought his life, that a good man 
might long hesitate in his choice, were he forced upon the hard 
alternative of being either Thomas Jefferson or Aaron Burr. 
. . . Circumstances unforeseen threw Burr into accidental com- 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


3 J 7 


petition with that man, whose policy was the cunning of selfish¬ 
ness, and whose friendship was the treachery of deceit. . . . 

With the recklessness produced by a present which had no 
comfort, and a future which promised no hope, he surrendered 
himself without shame to the grovelling propensities which had 
formed his first step on the road to ruin, until at last, overcome 
by disease, in the decay, of a worn-out body and the imbecility 
of a much-abused mind, he lay a shattered wreck of humanity, 
just entering upon eternity with not enough of man left about 
him to make a Christian out of. Ruined in fortune and rotten 
in reputation, thus passed from the busy scene one who might 
have been a glorious actor in it; and when he was laid in the 
grave, decency congratulated itself that a nuisance was removed, 
and good men were glad that God had seen fit to deliver society 
from the contaminating contact of a festering mass of moral 
putrefaction. 

Cruelty is always as foolish as it is ugly. And what is 
there in all Burr’s life more revolting than the frenzy of 
this cleric bespattering with abuse the corpse of an octo¬ 
genarian who had lain helpless for two years? Anonymous, 
the author nominates himself as the advocate of “decency,” 
admits that he is one of the “good men,” and pats God on 
the back for relieving him from the contagion of a man 
whom his deity permitted to live for eighty-one years! 

Perhaps God was pleased to let Burr live so long as an ex¬ 
ample of certain charms and courages and graces that may be 
dearer to Him than the hydrophobias of these ranting in¬ 
tolerant tyrants who lash mankind with their abuse, despise 
and distrust all human impulse, and invite us to a heaven 
that would be worse than hell, since they will be there in 
the front row. Perhaps they will not. There is always 
hope, here and hereafter. 


CHAPTER XLV 


B ETTY wept, they say, at the news of Burr’s death. She 
would say no slander against him—nor permit it said. 
She sighed: 

“Think how old he was and how many troubles he had!” 
She closed the mansion and did not return to it for five 
years. She lived in town with Mary and her husband, and 
when they moved to Hoboken she took lodgings at the Astor 
House. 

She went back to the sonorous name of Madame Jumel; 
but on occasion she was Mrs. Burr, if it brought her a greater 
prestige. 

Prestige was still her chief desire. She found that a hotel 
is a better place to hunt it than a home, especially a home at 
whose door no one knocks. Prestige is not a game of soli¬ 
taire. 

But in a hotel there are crowds to watch; crowds to be im¬ 
pressed by a haughty demeanor or a display of riches. Snubs 
can be overlooked and snobs cannot slam their street doors in 
one’s face, or deny to their dislikes the privilege of lobby, 
piazza, or dining saloon. The very promiscuity makes for 
a certain tolerance and people are not so particular whom 
they speak to, or sit next to. 

For its hotels, especially, Betty loved Saratoga. The 
waters at Ballston Spa had seemed to help her body and her 
mind, and when the fashion shifted a few miles away to 
Saratoga Springs, she went with the styles. 

She could be seen daily at the “elegant Grecian colonnade” 
erected over the Congress Spring. Though steamboats were 
plowing the Hudson and the second railroad in the United 
States ran from Schenectady to Saratoga, Betty preferred to 
drive up behind her own horses, until her final years. 

318 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


3i9 

Scores of Southern families came all the way from Vir¬ 
ginia with trains of slaves who made camp and filled the 
roadsides at night with dancing fires and the mellow beauty 
of African song. 

The most fashionable ladies from New York, Boston, 
Philadelphia, Baltimore, Richmond, even from Charleston, 
brought to the Springs their fashionable diseases and their 
belief that “the tonic qualities of the iron and the sparkling 
and enlivening influences of the fixed air that they possess 
in an extraordinary degree, have a wonderful effect upon 
enervated, bilious, and debilitated constitutions.” 

Betty stopped at the United States Hotel, of course, a 
vast brick edifice with enormous piazzas. In the stables she 
kept her horses, and no one else had better. No one else had 
carriages or coaches to compare with hers. 

Though the New York tyrants paid Betty little heed ex¬ 
cept to spread her history abroad, the social despot of Phil¬ 
adelphia, Doctor Rush’s wife, and the kindly Mrs. Harrison 
Gray Otis of Boston, forgot the strictness of the lines they 
drew at home and met Betty upon the piazzas with a smil¬ 
ing tolerance masking a certain amusement. 

Happening to be in America at the time when the return¬ 
ing Lafayette paused at Saratoga on his grand tour, Betty 
was permitted to be of the company that greeted him. Thur- 
low Weed asked the old man (who is always remembered as 
a young man) for a lock of his hair. Lafayette had vowed 
that no man should ever cut it; but he consented to be shorn 
if Mrs. Rush would wield the shears. When they were 
brought he lifted away his periwig and let her snip enough 
of his snow-white hair for souvenirs. 

Joseph Bonaparte was there as a private citizen and ate 
in the public dining room, where Betty cultivated him as 
best she could. 

Madame Jumel was one of the institutions and she spark¬ 
led as livelily as the water from the Congress Spring. She 
became eventually a pitiable laughing-stock and was as much 
inquired about by visitors as the lake, the battlefield, or the 
ancient witch Angelina Tubbs, *who lived on the bald peak 


320 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

called Mount Vista and earned an uncouth existence by for¬ 
tune-telling and trapping. It was said that the hag had once 
been a beautiful girl seduced under a promise of marriage 
and then cast aside. The tattered Angelina lived in a hut 
with a flock of cats, and could be seen roving the wildest 
crags in thunder, lightning, wind, and rain. 

But Betty hated solitude, sought the crowds, and tried to 
dazzle them with her splendor. Even Mrs. Rush was con¬ 
tent to take but one trunk to Saratoga with her, and a ward¬ 
robe limited to a black silk and one of grenadine, a poplin for 
morning wear and one for occasions of especial stateliness. 
But Betty carried the trappings of a new-wed princess and 
a retinue of servants. She bought herself a house in Cir¬ 
cular Street, but still frequented the hotels. 

Whatever benefit she had from the springs for her aging 
sinews, the aeration of the waters seemed to have an in¬ 
fluence upon her brain. Her mind was curiously inflated 
with “fixed air.” She grew boastful, defiant, ostentatious to 
such a degree that she failed to notice the ridicule growing to 
a low murmurous chorus about her path. 

She actually had a great yellow coach built for her and 
for a time rode about the streets behind eight horses, with 
outriders bouncing and horns fan faring. This was too much 
even for the pleasure-hunters at Saratoga, and finally a party 
of humorists was pleased to invent a diversion for the throng 
in which Betty played the chief comic role. And she had as 
one of her unobserved spectators a strange and strangely 
silent witness—her son. 

Since Betty, painted and powdered to a clownlike pallor, 
sat behind black horses and a black coachman, the humorists 
simply reversed her color scheme. Mr. Tom Brill put on 
livery and rode on the front seat of an open carriage, to the 
rear of which was affixed a great clothes basket in which Mr. 
Caleb Adams sat in footman’s garb. In the carriage seat 
lolled the negro, Tom Camel, dressed in woman’s clothes and 
imitating Betty’s haughty mannerisms, fanning himself and 
bowing to the crowds with all the ecstatic mimicry of his 
race. 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


321 

All about the town and its many drives and clear out to 
the lake the satirists shadowed Betty. When the parade 
drove up to the United States Hotel the tall columns of the 
crowded piazzas were almost shaken down by the noisy 
laughter. It was not until the comedy was half finished that 
Betty noted the true cause of the sensation she was creating 
and tried in vain to bribe or beg for mercy. 

If his own sworn testimony is to be believed, her own son 
beheld this pageant. 

After a hard life as a farmer’s white slave and a baker’s 
apprentice he had become a salesman and finally turned to the 
business of selling rubber. He prospered better as an agent 
for the lotteries which were employed by states, cities, and 
churches for every purpose, until the changing law destroyed 
their respectability. 

By the time he was twenty-five he was married. He built 
a house and was accepted as a substantial figure in Provi¬ 
dence life. He was pointed out to visitors as a son of 
George Washington, whom he resembled in frame and 
feature. 

But illegitimacy, while frequent enough, was not a thing 
to boast of, and though he believed that his father was the 
immortal George he kept to himself his belief that his mother 
was the immoral Betty. 

He told his wife never a word of her and he never went to 
call upon her on his frequent voyages to New York, though 
she had married a rich Frenchman. He had means enough 
to take him^and his wife to Saratoga regularly but he never 
visited Betty nor disclosed himself to her. 

Strange must have been his thoughts as he witnessed how 
time revenged himself upon the mother who disowned and 
ignored him. He disowned and ignored her, and when he 
saw her unconscious humiliations he kept his own to him¬ 
self. 

Long afterward he testified on oath that when his wife 
saw Madame Jumel and said “She’s a fine-looking lady,” he 
did not unbosom himself. 

He described, as he remembered it, the scene of the par- 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


3 22 

ody: “Madame Jumel was in her coach and four horses, a 
nigger man on one horse and a postillion in front, and she 
sitting back in the carriage alone. Behind her there was 
another carriage with four horses and a great big wench in 
the coach alone and a white man on the horse and a white man 
for a driver.” 

He testified that Freelove Ballou told him a year before 
she died that Betty Jumel was his mother, but gave no hint 
of his father’s name. 

The story was told that Betty, who never discussed him in 
her right mind, talked of him in her cups and in the strange 
moods that began to float like fogs about her cruel intellect 
at the last. 

A negress who cooked for her and whose child Betty 
called “my child,” tried to tell how Betty would sometimes 
take out a picture of George Washington Bowen and say that 
he was the only child she ever had. But the opposing law¬ 
yers objected, and the court sustained the objections. 

There was testimony to the effect that, as Betty grew sus¬ 
picious of conspiracies surrounding her and her hoard, she 
would break out into threats to bring forth her son as her 
only heir; and that once when she set out for Providence in 
her carriage, the greedy people who waited for her death and 
her wealth set the barn on fire to distract her attention; and 
that once when she did succeed in getting to him a letter 
inviting him to visit his mother, he sent back a curt refusal. 

But these disclosures, or inventions, were for the after- 
math. There was still enough red left in Betty’s sky to give! 
her a gorgeous sunset before the night came down. 


CHAPTER XLVI 


W HATEVER her curious aversion from her own flesh 
and blood, Betty must always have children about her. 
When the Mary Bownes that she had adopted and mar¬ 
ried off to Nelson Chase died and left a daughter named Eliza 
Jumel and a son called William Inglis, Betty took them un¬ 
der her wing as her own and carried them off to Europe. 

Though she had reached by now the age of Burr when he 
married her, she still tossed her old head and made herself 
once more at home in the presence of royalty. 

France, still groping for a form of government that should 
give liberty, glory, and prosperity all at once, had picked up 
Napoleon, dropped him, picked him up again, and dropped 
him finally with burnt fingers. 

The Bourbon family had come back. Louis XVI’s fat 
brother Louis XVIII had died and left the throne to his 
lean brother Charles X. Then France had decided to drop 
the Bourbons and the clerical tyrants that accompanied them, 
and try the Orleans family. The crown was transferred to 
that very Louis-Philippe who had been a school-teacher in 
Bloomingdale. He usually carried an umbrella instead of a 
scepter. 

In due time queasy France sickened even of the bourgeois 
king and decided to give the Bonapartes another try. Five 
million voters elected Prince Louis Napoleon President of 
the Second Republic and three years later he elected him¬ 
self emperor of the Second Empire. His coup dtetat was 
confirmed by nearly eight million votes against two hundred 
thousand in opposition. 

Louis, who had wandered nearly everywhere else, had 
spent a few months of wretchedness in New York, and the 

323 


3 2 4 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


story is told that Jumel lent him much money. Which is 
odd, seeing that Jumel had died some time before. 

Betty may have met the prince in New York. At any 
rate, when she reached Paris she somehow secured an invi¬ 
tation to a court ball at the Tuileries and wore a gown of gold 
brocade trimmed with black lace from Malta. 

She went in on the arm of Jerome Bonaparte, who had 
married Betty Patterson of Baltimore and forsaken her for 
the Princess of Wiirtemberg, by whom he had a son Jerome, 
called “Plon-Plon.” And Plon-Plon danced three times that 
night with Betty’s ward, the little seventeen-year old Eliza 
Chase. Later, Betty and Eliza went among the countless 
guests of the emperor to see him present the eagle to the 
army in the Champ de Mars. 

Though Betty had dropped Aaron Burr and his name, 
she found so little prestige in being known in France as the 
widow of a French merchant that she assumed the almost 
royal title of “Madame, Veuve d’Aaron Burr, feu Vice- 
President des Etats-Unis.” She had her carriage every¬ 
where, of course, and it was not the least resplendent in 
France. 

And once when she was driving along a country road and 
her way was checked by a body of marching soldiers, the 
indomitable bluffer stood up in her carriage and cried: 

“Place a la veuve du Vice-President des Etats-Unis!” 

She neglected to add that it had been nearly fifty years 
since he was Vice-President, and nearly sixteen years since 
she had divorced him, a few days before his death. But the 
soldiers could not be expected to know all that American 
history, and their officers were so impressed by Betty’s im¬ 
perial manner that they made their troops fall back and come 
to the salute, and Betty passed them in review like Maria 
Theresa riding round the line. 

With royal grace she picked out a husband for Eliza, a 
Frenchman, Paul Guillaume Raymond Pery of Bordeaux, 
and guaranteed him and his bride a thousand dollars a year 
provided they would live with her at the mansion in New 
York. 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


325 

Then she rode down the long roads to Rome, taking the 
bride with her as well as her thirteen-year old nephew 
William. 

In Rome she decided to have a portrait made of herself 
with her niece and her nephew on either side, and herself 
erect and royal in a high-backed chair furnished by her 
banker, Prince Torlonia, who said the chair had belonged to 
a pope. On her smooth face between the waves of her still 
gray less curls, or her wig, she still wears the very smile of 
Mona Lisa. She has much wonderful lace about her, and 
her gown is still the pigeon-throated blue she loved. The 
painter, Alcide Ercole, found or pretended to find her hands 
still slim and long and graceful; and her eyes look from the 
canvas full of innocence. She was just rising eighty years 
and she looks a wholesome fifty enjoying the much advertised 
rewards of a life spent in good works. 

Returning to Paris, she had a lithograph made and struck 
off with a legend engraved beneath declaring her the “widow 
of the late Aaron Burr, Vice President of the United States.” 
Also she had the tailors make her a set of green liveries for 
the postillions she decided to employ thereafter. 

As soon as she reached America her pride was brought 
down again, for when she sent word ahead of her that on 
leaving the train at the New York station in Carmansville 
she would give the village a view of her liveried postillions, 
she had to ride a gauntlet of stones and clods and worse 
things thrown at her by the irreverent American youth. 

She still carried herself, however, as a queen despite the 
rabble. She gave a thousand dollars to famine-wrung 
Ireland; a stand of colors to a regiment, and gifts of money 
to people in need. But she began to pinch the pennies and to 
gloat above her wealth like a miser of the theater. 


CHAPTER XLVII 


H ER years and the penalties of her years, if not of her 
sins, overtook her at last, as they overtake the most 
virtuous. Her ambitions, thwarted throughout a life of 
three-score and twenty years, were ironically achieved in her 
profound delusions of grandeur. 

Amazing as her progress had been from the depths of 
Providence to Washington Heights, the courts of France 
and immense wealth, she began to make the marvels miracles. 

She began to imagine impossible and incredible triumphs 
and to retail them to any gullible auditor that she encount¬ 
ered. And these maunderings were recounted and enlarged 
in the telling till she became a great myth, and the mother 
of myths still current as history. 

She detained all visitors with the skinny hand of Cole¬ 
ridge’s Ancient Mariner. To the men she told nasty stories. 
To the women tales of social triumphs. While the mansion 
and the gardens fell into decay and the headquarters of 
Washington became the dirty habitation of a witch, she 
moved about in a gloaming of harmless fantasy. 

Ghosts of all the great folk she had seen or heard of be¬ 
came familiar. Like a mad novelist, she incorporated them 
into a crowded masterpiece of fiction. 

Even her horses grew shaggy and her carriage shabby. 
When she rode to the Church of the Intercession she still 
adorned herself in noisy satins that made the worshippers 
turn and stare. But of weekdays she went about slipshod 
and slovenly. Yet now and then she would deck herself in 
tattered finery and climb to the great chair on the dais she 
had built in the drawing-room to chat with some musty 
revenant or fill with pretty lies the ears of a gaping visitor. 
During the early years of the Civil War a bevy of girls 
326 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


327 

ventured into her lair. One of them, a Miss Parker, after¬ 
ward Mrs. John V. I. Pruyn of Albany, wrote down as much 
as she could remember of these curious taradiddles, whose 
very foibles make a vivid picture of the workings of Betty’s 
forlorn mind: 

“She stood on the front doorsteps, which were painted with 
blue moons on a lavender floor—a more fearful-looking old 
woman one seldom sees—her hair and teeth were false—her 
skin thick, her feet enormous, and stockings soiled and coarse 
were in wrinkles over her shoes—on one foot a gaiter and on 
the other a carpet slipper. She wore a small hoop which in 
sitting down she could not manage, so that it stood up, display¬ 
ing her terrible feet. Over her shoulders she wore a rusty 
threadbare black velvet talma—and a soiled white merino scarf 
around her neck—her cap was made of the humbug white blond 
and cotton black lace and had long green streamers. And this 
was the fabulously wealthy and elegant Madame Jumel!” 

Betty received the girls as if they were all duchesses and 
she a queen. She led them to the sitting room. Her coach¬ 
man’s livery hung by the sideboard, a pair of soiled stock¬ 
ings lay in the comer; on the table, relics of a forlorn break¬ 
fast. The giggling young women were very much afraid 
that she would invite them to eat something, but they were 
quelled a little by her magnificently amiable manner. 

She told them of Aaron Burr’s vainly prolonged courtship 
and of Nelson Chase’s plea that if she married Burr, Burr 
would give Chase “a village he owned on the North River and 
$150,000 from Trinity church.” 

Reckless of fact as of money, she maundered on: 

“Joseph Bonaparte came to this country to marry me. 
He drove up to see me every day and bored me so much that 
I had the gate locked. To my surprise he climbed over the 
fence one day and went into my kitchen. I thought it was a 
great shame for the ex-king of Spain to be in my kitchen, and 
I decided to give him a grand dinner to wipe out my bad 
treatment. Joseph Bonaparte praised the table so much 
that I have kept it standing to this day.” 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


328 

She pointed to the dismal and almost petrified remnants 
of some old meal. There in the dining room on the left was 
the table; the china, the glass, still there. Gold ornaments 
amid pyramids of crumbled and molded confections clut¬ 
tered the greasy, dusty cloth. They had been there for 
twenty years. 

Betty told the awe-stricken girls of a ball she attended at 
the Tuileries: “I was one blaze of diamonds. When I en¬ 
tered, people whispered, ‘There comes the Vice-Queen of 
America to stab Louis Napoleon. Beware of her!’ 

“So I thought I’d act the queen. I tossed my head—like 
this—and sat down surrounded by my train. Then I thought 
I’d better go and speak to the emperor—you see, he was 
dancing with his cousin, Princess Mathilde. As soon as he 
sat down I rose—and there at my feet, by the way, was sit¬ 
ting Jerome Bonaparte—watching his son Prince Plon-Plon 
dancing with my little ward. 

“So I says, ‘Make way for the Vice-Queen!’ Jerome 
stood up and looked at me haughtily—te-he-he!—but I 
swept by him and went right up to the emperor, and when 
Louis didn’t notice me at first, I says, ‘Sire! sire!’ and 
stamped my foot so. 

“All the court pushed forward to take my dagger away, 
but I waved ’em back and I says: 

“‘Sire. I come to present’—(I made a low bow)—‘to 
present—myself, sire.’ Then I make another low bow, and 
I say, ‘I am the widow of Colonel Burr, the ex-President of 
the United States. I am Madame Jumel from Fort Wash¬ 
ington !’ 

“Of course I said it in French. Well, my dears, when he 
heard my name the emperor was so relieved he jumps up and 
he says: 

“ ‘Ah, my dear madame! my dear Madame Jumel, I am 
so glad to see you— enphante! —and when did you leave Fort 
Vashin’ton?’ 

“Well, the court fell bade, so relieved, and the emperor 
and I had the nicest chat, and we talked about my place here, 
and how I used to beat him at whist. I was expecting him 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


329 

to speak about the money he owed me—but you know how 
those emperors are. They expect other people to support 
them. 

“The way Louis came to borrow money from me was 
this: When he was just a wanderer in America he went out 
poaching near Hoboken and he got caught and arrested and 
fined two or three hundred dollars. He went to Mr. Chase, 
but, of course, he never had anything except what I gave 
him. And they both came to me, and I gave Louis the cash. 
And he’s got it yet!” 

She laughed like one of Macbeth’s hags, and then with 
an indescribable condescension, a fatigued and yawning 
hauteur, remembered another of her fantasies: 

“When I was at Palermo, I liked the palace ever so much. 
There’s a great door opening on seven halls with mirrors 
from ceiling to floor. Oh, but I liked it! I saw myself in 
every mirror—as many me’s as you can imagine. And there 
have been so many me’s. 

“Well, I stamped my foot—like this—and I said, 'This 
palace shall be mine!’ 

“The duke was a widower, though I didn’t know it at 
the time. Somebody must have told him what I said, for the 
next day, who should come to my lodgings but the duke!— 
all in lace and diamonds! And somebody said, ‘Where are 
you going, duke?’ and he says, ‘To present myself to the 
Vice-Queen of America!’ 

“Well, of course, I received him and after a long, long 
talk, he left—kissed my hand six times! Well, I says to my 
little ward, ‘Eliza,’ I says, ‘that man is going to bore us. 
Let’s go to Paris to-night!’ And we did. 

“Would you believe ft, we had hardly reached Paris when 
here comes a beautiful letter in French—from the Duke of 
Palermo, of course, and he offers me his hand and half his 
possessions if I would only marry him. 

“I didn’t answer him, and, next thing I know, there is the 
duke in Paris, begging me, imploring me to marry him. But 
I looked down at him and I says: 

“T am faithful to the memory of Monsieur Jumel. I 


330 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

bear to you the celestial affection that the angels in heaven 
bear to one another. I love you as a brother; but in no other 
way.’ 

“The poor man kissed my hand, and kissed it and kissed 
it, and departed overcome with grief. My dears, I was sev¬ 
enty-two years old. Think of my inspiring such love! 
Parle z-vous frangcris, ma chere?” 

Miss Parker replied, “Oui, madame, je Is parts avec 
faeilite.” 

Betty amazed the schoolgirls with her glib French, in 
whose purity they at least could find no fault. Suddenly she 
reverted to English: 

“Have you seen my place at Saratoga? I call it the Tuil- 
eries. I bought it in ten minutes because I liked it. I 
haven’t been there for three years, because Mr. Chase told 
me that the rich men in the hotels were having a crown of 
precious stones made to crown me queen. It frightened me 
so that I packed up and returned home at once. I think, 
though, I shall go back next summer. Won’t you go with me, 
my dear?” 

“Certainly,” said the diplomatic Miss Parker. Betty asked 
her address and showed her a frame containing a letter she 
had written to the regiment known as the Grays of Syracuse, 
presenting it with a stand of colors, and a letter of thanks 
from the Grays. 

This led her to talk of the war even then tearing asunder 
the nation that had been founded the year of her birth. She 
rather sympathized with the South, but the slaughter de¬ 
pressed her. She sighed with a grandiose gloom: 

“Mr. William R. Astor recognized my horses before a 
shop downtown and came in to tell me that the North and 
South would only be reconciled by making me queen of the 
united country. What do you think of the plan?” 

Naturally, the girls thought it an excellent plan. Also, 
they thought it an excellent plan to be going home. But she 
kept them for two hours, telling them Munchausenesque 
fables of the new mirror-lined house with seven halls that 
she was going to build, of all the treasures Captain Kidd 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


33i 

had buried in her grounds, of George Washington’s inti¬ 
macy at her father’s house, of her birth as a Quaker and her 
intense religious faith. 

She followed the girls out to their carriage in this final 
mood of spiritual exaltation, and her strange old eyes haunted 
them as they were driven away, feeling sorry for her “child¬ 
less and forlorn old age” and moralizing upon its contrast 
with “the brilliancy of her youth and good fortune.” Miss 
Parker closes her chronicle with the profoundly youthful 
reflection, “This verifies my belief that to a certain extent 
all things are equal.” 

Betty’s manias were innumerable, and many of them are 
to be found solemnly repeated by persons who neglected to 
look up the contradictory dates. 

There is hardly a famous man or monarch who was not 
mentioned as one of her friends or lovers; Benjamin Frank¬ 
lin adored her, Patrick Henry loved her; Alexander Hamil¬ 
ton discussed his great theories of government with her and 
made her his mistress; in fact the founding of the Republic 
and the establishment of the Constitution were pretty well 
determined in the brilliant salon this intellectual Aspasia con¬ 
ducted in her New York home (and this at a time when she 
was really a ragged illiterate child in Providence). 

Lafayette was a guest of hers and she often showed the 
bed he slept on. She played chess with Louis Napoleon, and 
lent him money which he repaid, according to some of her 
statements, and, according to others, forgot. The Empress 
Eugenie gave her a diamond necklace. This was hardly 
true; though Washington Irving could say: “Louis Napo¬ 
leon and Eugenie de Monti jo—Emperor and Empress of 
France! He whom I received as an exile at my cottage on 
the Hudson, she whom at Granada I have dandled on my 
knee!” 

But it was true that when Louis Napoleon made Eugenie 
empress, he had to put on her head the crown Napoleon 
placed on the head of his second wife; for Betty Jumel 
owned the crown that Napoleon placed on his first wife’s 
head. 


CHAPTER XLVIII 


G RANDEUR was the sunshine of Betty's latter life. 

But that bewildered creature her soul had also its ter¬ 
rifying hours. Her mad ingenuity began to devise horrors 
for its own torment. 

Conspiracies were set on foot to storm the mansion and 
slay her and steal her jewels and her riches. 

Charity and self-protection connived at a queer procedure. 
She learned that a score or more of French immigrants were 
starving in New York and she took them all into her pay, 
formed them into a military company, and established them 
at the mansion as her own imperial bodyguard, paid for out 
of her own revenues and uniformed fantastically. 

Sentinels stood at the gates; there was a brass band for 
the drills and the parades and for concerts. Boys who 
fished in the Harlem River could hear the music blare and 
catch glimpses of Betty riding at the head of her little army, 
straight as a grenadier and turning now and then to issue 
a command. After leading them about her estates, she would 
halt her horse and review her troops. The drill would end 
in a clatter of volley fire. She practiced with a pistol her¬ 
self and boasted of her marksmanship. 

All through the night the guards were posted and relieved; 
and since it seemed necessary for the army to find a pretext 
for its continued existence, every now and then there would 
be an alarm, guns would be fired, the guards would be 
routed out of bed and set to searching the woods. 

She went again to Saratoga, but one day at table gave a 
sudden start and became another person. On the way back 
to New York her actions frightened the passengers in the 
train. From then on her doom was evident. 

Sometimes the fifteen-year-old lad, William Chase, was 
332 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


333 

put in command of the troops, but he was soon deposed. For 
not all of Betty’s fears were for attacks from outside. The 
mania of treachery within afflicted her. 

She began to turn against the people she had lavished her 
affections upon. She accused her grandnephew of fixing a 
heavy cornice so that it would fall upon her and kill her. She 
accused Eliza Pery of trying to poison her. She made Nel¬ 
son Chase taste the tea he brewed for her before she would 
drink it. 

In frenzies of sudden detestation she would drive all of 
her relatives from the house, then receive them back with 
tears and kisses, only to round upon them again. 

Her mind, like the wounded scorpion of legend, was poi¬ 
soning itself and dying in the throes of agony. 

One day young William Inglis Chase, who stands at her 
right hand in the portrait, offended her. Miss Parker says 
that, though he was only fifteen years old, “he ran off with 
a woman much older than himself who wanted his fortune, 
and that madame discarded him.” 

According to Shelton, young William, in a rage at Betty, 
threw an inkstand at her portrait and hit his own shoulder. 
In any case, Betty sewed a black patch over the boy’s face 
on the canvas. She told Miss Parker that “his character is 
defaced, and not the picture. There it shall remain until he 
redeems himself.” She did not mention him in her will. 

When the boy’s father, Nelson Chase, came home to the 
mansion, he found all his belongings and the boy’s thrown 
out upon the lawn. Thenceforth Betty lived alone. 

She had been ungratefully used, as she saw it. She had 
adopted children for their companionship and they had 
abandoned her or used her. She guaranteed them money if 
they would live with her. She had kept Nelson Chase in idle 
expectation of great wealth, and Monsieur Pery of France 
with his love of huge dogs and deep draughts of liquor. 
None of them seemed to her to love her for herself, but only 
to be keeping a death-watch upon her and her wealth. 

So she banished them and dwelt alone, visited only by her 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


334 

pastor (for she grew more religious than ever), by her physi¬ 
cian, and by lawyers, policemen or tradesmen or plumbers. 

She kept the rickety Venetian blinds drawn tight and wan¬ 
dered about early and late from room to room, stirring the 
sodden dust with her shuffling feet, but letting in no sunshine. 

In her bitterness she planned to thwart the hopeful heirs 
whose affection she had come to suspect of mercenary mo¬ 
tives. 

She and her lawyers wrought at a will that should prevent 
their having any reward for their long patience. But the 
lawyers could not bring her thoughts into cohesion, and by 
the time they had drafted the wills she dictated, her wits 
could not be brought to the signing of the documents. 

Her pastor, Mr. Smith, had better success, and came one 
day with two witnesses and a will, “and she in a fumbling 
kind of way put her signature to it.” In this document she 
bequeathed sixteen lots as the site of a new church 
for Mr. Smith and seventy thousand dollars for the building. 
She gave Mr. Smith five thousand dollars for himself, and 
sums to various charities; the New York Hospital, the Or¬ 
phan Asylum, the Institution for the Instruction of the 
Deaf and Dumb, the Society for the Relief of the Destitute 
Children of Seamen, the Fund for Aged and Infirm Clergy¬ 
men of the Protestant Episcopal Church; the Missionary 
Society for Seamen; the Bible Society; the Association for 
the Relief of Respectable, Aged, Indigent Females. 

She left for Eliza Pery and her husband and their child the 
income from ten thousand dollars—a few hundred dollars 
a year. 

To Nelson Chase and his son William Inglis she be¬ 
queathed never a penny. 

The pastor carried this will away with him and kept it 
against the fatal day. 


CHAPTER XLIX 


I F Betty had gone mad, so had the world. Everybody 
agreed that everybody was rushing to destruction and 
everything was wrong. This has been one of the few beliefs 
in which the majority of mankind has usually agreed at any 
given period since mankind began. 

The Civil War was but the crash of the disaster. There 
had been plentiful omens in the general decay of American 
morals and manhood and womanhood. 

The pulpit and the press rang with alarm and Mr. John 
F. Watson in 1856 summed up the universal dismay so com¬ 
pletely that he may well be quoted at length. The only bright 
spots in the general murk were the wonderful things that 
had been achieved in the way of science. He indicated a few: 

Rail Roads and Cars—annihilating space—Telegraphic wires, 
conversing at unlimited distances—Steamers traversing every 
Sea—Steam-Engines and power adapted to all kinds of manu¬ 
factures—Stereotyping everything on paper—Daguerreotypes 
cheapening the likenesses of everybody—the conquest of Mexico 
—the opening trade of California and Oregon—the discovery of 
gold and quick Silver. Yet the ingenuity and device of Crime 
are becoming more apparent—Operas are now fostered—sup¬ 
planting natural music—Immodest Exposure of female limbs in 
dancing Polkas, and the like—our mothers and grandmothers 
were too modest to behold such things—Circuses, Menageries, 
and human Models (libidinous) find favor—Riders and Beasts, 
multiply in all our cities, &c. 

All is now self-exalted and going upon stilts. It all comes 
from foreign influence—our addictedness to imitate what is 
foreign and modish. 

Once it was pleasant and safe to walk the streets—now tall 
houses are crowded with numerous working tenants. ’Tis ter¬ 
rible now to sicken and die at crowded streets, where the rattle 
of omnibuses is unceasing. 


335 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


336 

The mass of the traveling public now have no conception of 
the things they have lost by the modern means of going by Rail¬ 
ways. Now we build vessels of 3,000 tons (and even of 5,000!) 
to traverse between our coasts and Europe. In 1818 Jeremiah 
Thompson built Packets of 300 tons—and in 1821 he added one 
of 500 tons, which was disused as too large for the then trade. 
Vessels arriving off the coast of New York in winter if the 
ice and frost were severe, used to put back to Charleston or 
the West Indies, there to thaw and to stand out till Spring. But 
now Vessels only put off to the Gulph Stream and there loosen 
their icy fetters and return back to New York. . . . 

It is often observed, that the young, in fashionable life, are far 
more arrogant and assuming in companies of display and ex¬ 
hibition, than they used to be. They are far less reverent to 
the aged than in former times—pushing them aside, from coun¬ 
sel or controul. Former shame-facedness of youth, is regarded 
as awkward mauvaise honte and not to be tolerated in “good 
society/’ so called. Europeans even now, among us, wonder at 
the unrestrained freedom of talk and action, of our young 
females.—They now have their social Soirees to themselves,—all 
young together. 

At this time a fashionable dry goods store advertises, a lace 
scarf for 1500 dollars! Another, has a bridal dress for 1,200 
dollars. Bonnets at 200 dollars are also sold. Cashmeres, from 
300 dollars and upwards, are seen, by dozens along Broadway. 
And 100 dollars is quite a common price for a silk gown. Think 
of such a scale of prices for “un-ideaed” American women! 
Can the pampering of such vanities, elevate the character of 
our women ? Alas! the women who live for such displays—who 
give their whole attention to diamonds and dress, are fast becom¬ 
ing unfitted for wives or mothers—and are operating the ruin of 
husbands and parents. Do we not greatly need voluntary 
sumptuary laws and restraints! History records, that when the 
Roman matrons fell into similar extravagances, the Empire 
itself, felt the deterioration, and fast fell into its decline! Will 
any consider! One serious consideration is, that prudent 
thoughtful men, cannot engage in matrimonial alliances. In 
this, the ladies themselves will become sufferers. . . . 

Hoops Again. —We had hoped that our ladies would never 
again be brought to use such ill-looking, useless and deforming 
appendages to their dresses—They are, as seen along our streets, 
a Misdemeanor. They are so suggestive of immodest thoughts. 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


337 

both while worn and also when seen dangling from stores along 
’the streets, just like so many parachutes. One feels as if they 
must be scanning them, to conjecture how and where the limbs 
therein could be found! They are too, so annoying and en¬ 
grossing of place and room in omnibuses. . . . Ladies who pro¬ 
fess to be Christians and communicants too, pledged “to re¬ 
nounce the vain pomp and vanities of the world, and not to be 
led thereby” go up to the sacramental altar, showing before 
the eyes of all beholders—an unseemly vanity! . . . 

Mr. Barnum has created a new era in public excitability—He 
uses the press with such dexterity to puff himself and his ex¬ 
hibitions, as to make himself the focus of all that is popular;— 
all to make his own fortune!—None but himself could have 
ventured on such a great amount of money to Jenny Lind for 
her visit—Think of so much being awarded for singing! Is it 
possible that it is, indeed, so super-human and exalted as to be 
really worth the contribution—or is it excited phrenzy! . . . 

Really my country, is so much increased in crime of all kinds ' 
and characters, as makes me feel heart-sick to think of its 
progress—and the state of society to which I am to leave my 
heirs. It really makes life of far less value to live it—and 
almost makes one sigh for a change into another and better 
world. 

These combinations of lawless lads in the cities of Phila¬ 
delphia and New York, under indicative names—signifying 
outlawry and mischief,—is wholly a new manifestation of prog¬ 
ress :—Such as have made “houses of Refuge” indispensable for 
the security of Society against their crimes and encroachments. 
The good people of the Olden time, had no such disturbers of 
their peace—All boys worked at something useful in their times. 
Cheap Theatres and Comic allurements, are now their visited 
night schools. 

The year 1852 has been a season of most appalling crime—so 
many gross murders—rapes—cruelties. See the book, Hot Corn 
of New York. Excessive destruction of life, by “Accidents,” 
&c.,—One who fears God, may well fear his judgment,—unless 
we repent and turn. There has been a morbid sensibility for 
criminals—a desire to screen them from the merited gallows— 
This encourages wickedness—Religion itself, seems not to have 
the same hold and influence, on the mass—Men grow up by 
example to forget God. . . . 

Now stockings are made too cheaply to permit of knitting 


338 THE GOLDEN LADDER' 

them; but in former times, mothers and daughters were always 
busy at their knitting, while sitting in attention to calls from 
visitors—They not only, were proud to knit their own wear 
well, but they also, made coarser ones for the boys and servants 
—made of thread and woollen yarn—and if in large families 
they could not do all, they hired women helps, to do them— 
Young ladies, then, truly, could not get time for Fianos, Opera, 
Theatre and spectacles. 

Stores for sale of shirts and drawers—is a modern affair— 
Such a thing would not have succeeded when females, univer¬ 
sally, in families worked out such articles—Now females—very 
genteel, have not the time! 

It is new to use professional singers in churches— 

It is still newer to sing responses while kneeling, as in the ten 
commandments. 

The use of Cloroform in painful surgical operations, is new 
and assisting wonderfully. . . . 

Dispepsia in men, and spinal diseases in women, are new 
forms of diseases, coming in, as a consequence of luxurious 
and indulgent living. 

Carriers —It is a modern thing to send home parcels from 
the stores, for purchasers,—and equally new for Butchers to 
send home meats purchased. Men and women took home their 
own marketing; and many boys of good families, went with 
wheel-barrows, and stopt near the markets till filled—One re¬ 
members well, many young ladies of good families, who used 
to do all the marketing. . . . 

The frequency of these deathly assaults on fellow citizens, 
without compunction, by those who have gone into the use of 
Colt’s pistols, and the Bowey knife,—are wholly affairs of 
modern times—The fatal instruments, and their terrible effects, 
are of latter day origin. We once used to contemplate assassi¬ 
nations as almost wholly confined to Spaniards:—And we had 
undefined dreads of Spanish ports in Cuba and South America. 
Every American visiting such Ports, held himself, very cautious 
in his walks about their towns and suburbs—Now they have 
become familiar, to our ears, as of frequent occurrence among 
ourselves, in almost all parts of our extended Country. While 
so many are essaying to put down public executions for deadly 
crimes, few or none come forth in strength to abate the number 
of impulsive assassinations. 

The increase of luxurious living, is operating powerfully 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 339 

against early marriages, as mothers and daughters may readily 
notice The Home Journal , speaking of this subject, instances, 
the ascertained fact, that although the year 1856 has been a 
privileged Leap year, there was, at Boston 20 per cent less of 
marriages there, than the year preceeding. The cause is indeed 
to be found in the fact, that the shrine to love and marriage is 
crushingly draped with silks at from 3,00 to 15,00 dollars a 
yard It is festooned with laces at prices to cause terror to hear 
it expensive jewelry flashes through the meshes, everywhere. 
—Silver plate, paved thick upon leases of “genteel residences,” 
support the altar; and Milliners’ and other bills, litter the base 
of it.—Great sighs heaved from the bottom of prudent but 
hopeless hearts, are all that is given to Hymen. Marriage is 
becoming a luxury to men.—And those, whose means are limited, 
are as much prohibited from its adoption as by a police regula¬ 
tion. . . . O, for a restoration of ginghams and prints! Is 
there no deliverance from the silken web of evil, which French 
looms are weaving for us? 

Our fathers used to tell of the profligacy of Paris; their chil¬ 
dren tell of the mysteries of New York, a city not far behind 
any in Europe. And making proper allowance for size, how 
far is New York ahead of our other cities and towns? Once 
was a time when a wife was “help meet.” We boast of our 
system of education; we have female high schools, female col¬ 
leges, female medical schools. Our girls are refined, learned, 
wise; they can sing, dance, play pianos, paint, talk French and 
Italian, and all the soft languages, write poetry, and love like 
Venuses. They are ready to be courted at ten years, and can 
•be taken from school and married at fifteen, and divorced at 
twenty. They make splendid shows on bridal tours, can 
coquette, and flirt at the watering places, and shine like angels, 
at winter parties. But heaven be kind to the good man who 
marries in the fashionable circles. . . . And here is our intol¬ 
erable stupidity once more; having children is left to the Irish! 
What lady thinks of having nasty children about her now?— 
or if she is unfortunate, don’t sho put them to wet nurses to 
begin with, and boarding schools afterwards ? 

We repeat—we have come to a point, where young men hesi¬ 
tate and grow old before they can decide whether they can 
marry, and afterwards keep clear of bankruptcy and crime. . . . 
We find now, that in the town of Hancock, with more than 
eight hundred inhabitants, no marriage is recorded for the year 


340 THE GOLDEN LADDER 

1855; and in Cheshire, Middleton, Munroe, Montgomery, Rox- 
borough, Halifax and Rutland, with populations varying from 
two hundred and seventeen to fifteen hundred, but one marriage 
is reported in each. . . . 

To buttress this opinion, we here give—the words of the 
Philadelphia Ledger to wit: 

“If we go on with the life we have lived for the last genera¬ 
tion, we shall exhaust ourselves prematurely.—Why are we, as 
a race, so nervous? Is it not because our mode of life exhausts 
our vital energies prematurely?—We work too hard, we think 
too hard, seek pleasure too hard—We are moderate, in short, 
in nothing. ... At forty, our men are as old as Englishmen 
or Frenchmen at fifty-five; and our women at thirty, are as 
faded as European ones at forty. . . . The rush for excitement 
is sapping their lives; and must entail weak Constitutions on 
the rising generation.” 

The countless evils of that degenerate day (and all days 
seem to be degenerate in the eyes they illuminate) were 
largely due to the restlessness of women and their greedy 
demand for more and more. Books were published in vain 
to dissuade the sex from overstepping the bounds set to it by 
divine resentment of Eve’s responsibility for the Fall of 
Man. 

In spite of such warnings, Doctor Brockett in his book 
011 Women , published in 1869 must still point out that legally 
“the wife is the bondservant of her husband. She can do no 
act whatever but by his permission, at least tacit. Her chil¬ 
dren are by law his children. He alone has any rights over 
them. Even after he is dead, she is not their legal guardian, 
unless he by will has made her so.” This was modified by 
certain of the United States, but not all. 

He quotes the incident of an Englishman who beat his mis¬ 
tress for disobeying him. The judge rebuked him because 
the woman was not his slave, not accountable to him for 
every moment of her time, since she was not his wife. 

“The Church and all State offices are closed to women. No 
single woman, having been seduced, has any remedy at com¬ 
mon law. If her father can prove service rendered, he may 
sue for loss of service.” 


34i 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 

Doctor Brockett pointed out that the inferiority of women 
in intellectual and artistic pursuits proved the Creator’s will 
to keep them in subordination to men. 

. He derided the vain effort of Vassar College and others to 
give girls a thorough education: “but they all are engaged in 
an impossible task. This so-called fashionable education is 
ruining the health and the intellects, and greatly impairing 
the moral character of thousands of our young women, and it 
should be abolished forthwith.” 

He deprecated the effort of women to earn their own liv¬ 
ings, as the home was the proper career. For a woman 
whose husband was dead, or worthless, he had sympathy, but 
felt that she was unfitted for almost every task. “She may 
take in washing, go out at times as a charwoman, sew, knit, 
or drive a sewing machine; if she is educated, she may teach 
a small school at home, or she may teach music, or drawing, 
or French or German, or manage a small store.” He did not 
include literary labor because the payments are “usually so 
precarious and so long delayed, that it cannot be considered 
as in any respect a dependance.” He thought that women, 
in need should rely on charity. 

Medicine and the law were, of course, closed careers to 
almost all the sex. The stage offered some opportunity, and 
there had been doubtless some good women there, but “in the 
present condition of the drama, no woman has a right to im¬ 
peril her reputation and her hopes of heaven by entering 
upon a theatrical career. The atmosphere of the theater is, 
at the present day, wholly corrupting.” 

He glanced at the field of social evil and admitted with 
horror that “of the women between the ages of fifteen and 
thirty, one out of every twelve (some very careful statis¬ 
ticians say one out of every ten) is a thing of shame. And 
this in an enlightened, Christian nation in the latter half of 
the nineteenth century, and despite all our efforts to promote 
purity and holiness.” 

He imputes the blame to “the circulation in secret of vile 
books and prints in a large proportion of our female sem¬ 
inaries,” and to the fashionable mode of education. He 


342 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


doubts that poverty has really much to do with it. No place 
was safe, apparently, for ‘‘procuresses have entered Sabbath- 
schools, procured situations as teachers, and used their posi¬ 
tion to drag innocent souls down to perdition. The fatal 
facility of divorce greatly increases the number of women 
who lead an abandoned life.” He advocates the more rigid 
enforcement of “laws against the publication and sale of 
vile books, prints, newspapers, jewelry, &c.” 

As for woman’s suffrage, he is opposed to manhood suf¬ 
frage without property or educational qualifications and finds 
so many reasons against woman suffrage that they take up 
half of a large volume. He implores women to save them¬ 
selves by “the sublime art of bread-baking.” He prays for a 
discontinuance of “protracted and exciting dances,” the al¬ 
most equally exciting skating parties and the questionable 
velocipede riding. “The moral culture will, we hope, come in 
time.” 

From such a world, harrowed by such anxieties, Betty was 
already passing. She had not been very good, but through¬ 
out her life span everybody confessed that the times had al¬ 
ways been very bad. In a world where women were expected 
to stay at home and to depend upon charity rather than their 
own exertions for their support, she had managed to rise 
from the gutter of a small town to splendor in a great city 
and the possession of property worth far more than a million 
dollars. 

Beginning in rags and shame, she had achieved royal rai¬ 
ment, imperial jewels, the nods of crowned heads, two hus¬ 
bands—and an immortal mansion, if not in the skies, at least 
as near to them as one might come in New York. 

She had encountered snubs and ostracism from many, but 
her walls were hung with framed invitations from kings and 
countesses. On a planet that had burned Joan of Arc at 
the stake, and denounced Florence Nightingale as worse than 
a prostitute, Betty’s punishment was mild and of little value 
in proof of anything important. 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 343 

She had chosen almost the only path to riches open to 
women from the beginning of the world. 

The great war that raged during her final years meant little 
to her clouded brain, but to the world it meant a tremendous 
blow at human slavery. It began the emancipation of women 
and opened to them all the honorable ways of attaining suc¬ 
cess that man has discovered. After Betty’s day it was no 
longer necessary for women to gain their ambitions ex¬ 
clusively by the permission of men, or to bribe the fates by 
their traffic in love or its counterfeit. 

Madame Jumel marks, therefore, the climax of an era. 
She is an allegory, an exemplar of a venerable tradition, the 
last grand actress in the ridiculous tragedy based on the sub¬ 
lime nonsense of woman’s subjection to man. It ran for ages 
and it was the solemn ideal of centuries. Yet it failed at 
last. How many more of our solemn ideals will be washed 
away by the following years? 

With the final mockery of our demand that people who 
lead wicked lives shall die in misery, the last months of 
Betty’s life were glorified by the belief that the premises were 
filled with hidden treasure. She pleaded that it be sought 
for. Also, she was endowed with the royal power of miracu¬ 
lous cure by the laying on of hands. 

A queen to the death, she must have her blenching features 
rouged and powdered every day. Her nightcap was threaded 
with pink ribbons and she spent her last hours upon the 
bed that Napoleon had slept on, in the bedroom where George 
Washington had slept. 

And there she—slept. 



CHAPTER L 


J UST after the close of the Civil War that had parted 
the disunited States for four years, the war that had 
lasted a little more than ninety years ended among all the 
souls of Betsy Bowen Jumel Burr. She died on a Sunday 
morning, the 6th of July, 1865. 

In the New York Times of the following Tuesday ap¬ 
peared a two-column obituary stating that she had been born 
of an English mother, Mrs. Capet, in the cabin of a French 
frigate, en route with troops from La Brest to the West 
Indies. Her mother had died and the captain kept her until 
he was driven into Newport Harbor, where he placed her in 
the custody of an elderly lady named Thompson, a good 
woman. Betty’s early years were passed among good in¬ 
fluences. 

When about seventeen she fell in love with a Captain 
Croix. They eloped to New York, where Croix’s position in 
society was such as to gain for her entree to the best families. 
She was present at the first session of Congress at Philadel¬ 
phia, 1774 and at Washington’s inauguration. She is sup¬ 
posed to have met Burr when he was a captain in the army. 
She was also an intimate friend of Benedict Arnold, and 
considered Mrs. Arnold her best friend. She “started in 
Patrick Henry’s breast a dangerous fire of love and passion.” 

The article goes on to say that Betty is supposed to have 
met Burr at the rooms of Lady Stirling, where Thomas Jef¬ 
ferson was a frequent visitor. Ben Franklin called Betty 
his “Fairy Queen,” and was so intimate as “to salute her 
lips in the presence of friends.” General Knox was also a 
worshiper at her feet—also Lafayette. 

She married Jumel, who made a fortune in the wine trade. 
She went to Paris. Lafayette’s patronage opened the doors 
for her there. 


344 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 345 

When Jumefs fortune was gone, Betty returned to the 
United States alone to recoup it for him. She had signal 
success. Jumel, in 1828, at the age of sixty-four, returned 
to the United States to find himself possessed of means at 
once abundant and satisfactory. They lived happily until 
his death. 

Burr was at his time practicing law. There was talk of 
cholera, and Betty, who had large real-estate interests, de¬ 
termined on a carriage tour in the country. She decided to 
consult Burr, who was pre-eminent in real-estate law. From 
this meeting proceeded the renewed friendship that resulted 
in their marriage. 

If Betty could have read this fairy-tale she would have 
smiled triumphantly. Under its flattering shade she was 
buried in the Trinity Cemetery on the high slopes of the 
Hudson River. Stephen Jumel remained in the Catholic 
Cemetery downtown at Mott and Prince Streets. 

The mythology she built up with such care in her keener 
years was enlarged by the wonders her rambling wits con¬ 
ceived. But her death and her wealth, as the lawyer O’Conor 
was to say, “broke open the box of Pandora.” 

In the inventory of her estate her bank balance was found 
to be $3,645 with a promissory note for $18,000. Her per¬ 
sonal property was totaled at the sum of $1,238.74, which 
included three dilapidated carriages valued, one at twenty 
dollars, one at fifteen (a gift, she said, from Louis-Philippe), 
and one at five; and two fuzzy gray horses valued at thirty 
dollars each. 

The poor old horses dragged out of their stupor in the 
slumberous barn must have wondered what it was all about. 

And so do I. 

The horses may have recalled the guard-mounts and the 
golden days when they stepped high and switched their white 
tails against the glistening whippletrees of the glossiest 
carriage in town. 

But the rickety estate of all of them, horses, carriages, and 
Betty, was the bankruptcy that follows human endeavor, 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


346 

good and bad (if anyone can be sure of the exact definition 
of either epithet). 

Of the jewels that still sparkled, though Betty’s eyes were 
dull, the appraisers found not one. If was said that they 
were buried at night in the garden to escape the appraisers. 
Years later they were exhibited at a charity fair in Doctor 
Vandewater’s Harlem church. Some of them may be seen to 
this day by one who has the right to ask for a look. 

The family that Betty left turned the decaying house into 
a small Bedlam. Nelson Chase, who had remarried, lived 
in the Burr room and took his meals alone. He rose at five 
o’clock and demanded his breakfast with loud profanity. 
Monsieur and Madame Pery lived in the Washington room 
and ate at a different hour from the family of William In- 
glis Chase, who occupied the rooms above the great dining 
room. Miss Nitschke, the governess of the Pery child, slept 
in the Lafayette room and shared nothing except the vapors 
of the one distracted cook. 

According to Miss Nitschke, Mrs, Will Chase suffered ter¬ 
rors every night from the visitations of the ghost of Madame 
Jumel, who “came with terrible rappings about midnight.” 

Monsieur Pery, who often toasted cheese in the kitchen, 
said that Madame Jumel came to his bedside all dressed in 
white. 

The governess did not believe in ghosts—not even when 
she asked the loud rapper if she wished to have prayers said 
for her and was “assured by three knocks, the knock language 
for ‘yes’.” The raps seemed to be in the walls, now on one 
side of the room, now on another. There was also the drum¬ 
ming of a skeleton hand on the east front window. When 
the raps seemed to come from the room where the child 
Mathilde Pery slept undisturbed, Miss Nitschke looked in 
there and “the tapping continued on the tin slop pail, and 
then ceased altogether.” 

With an unlaid ghost and an undivided legacy estimated 
at over a million dollars and a number of conflicting wills in 
existence, It is small wonder that a neighbor, Charles 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 347 

O’Conor, had occasionally to be called in to promote the 
peace. 

This distinguished lawyer, who had acted in the divorce 
case for Aaron Burr, was soon joined by numerous other 
lawyers in a famous group of lawsuits extending on and on 
for years until the wealth was gone and only the old house 
and the neglected grounds were left. 

The resident heirs, the Chases and Perys, attacked the will 
as soon as the Rev. John Howard Smith produced it. Each 
of the societies for the deaf, dumb, destitute, indigent, re¬ 
spectable, orphan, and infirm, hurried its own lawyers into 
court. 

The relatives claimed that when Madame Jumel made the 
will under the undue influence of the Reverend Mr. Smith 
she was “exceedingly infirm in body and mind and had con¬ 
ceived an insane and unnatural antipathy toward the children 
whom she had theretofore tenderly cherished and treated as 
her own.” 

The jury’s verdict was that she was of an unsound mind. 
The will was therefore set aside and men appointed to ad¬ 
minister the estate; one of these was the William Ballou 
Jones whom Lavinia Ballou had married. He was the illegi¬ 
timate son of Betty’s stepsister, Polly Clarke. Yet the chil¬ 
dren of Mary Bownes were barred because their mother and 
grandmother had been illegitimate. A crowd of stepheirs, 
mainly illegitimate, was recognized. 

Nelson Chase bought up the claims of the Jones family for 
forty thousand dollars. Later the Jones family went to law 
to set aside the quit-claim deeds. 

Then the French heirs of Stephen Jumel appeared and the 
court awarded them a sixth part of his estate. 

There were twenty cases in court, and four suits of eject¬ 
ment brought jointly by thirty-eight plaintiffs, all descendants 
of the impossible Phebe Kelley. 

Mr. O’Conor and Mr. James C. Carter, eminent members 
^f the bar, took up the claims of Nelson Chase as a specu¬ 
lation, and the court awarded them fees of $75,000 and 
$100,000, respectively. Indeed, the court set aside from the 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


348 

final settlement nearly a quarter of a million dollars in fees, 
arrears of taxes, and assessments. 

In the chaos of all these trials Betty’s past was dug out 
of the grave and hung up for all the world to see. But now 
confusion was worse confounded, for everything that any¬ 
body affirmed was denied by somebody else; affidavit con¬ 
tradicted affidavit; cross-examination disputed examination; 
and senile witnesses refuted themselves so often that the 
truth can never be known. 

It was the clergyman Smith who wrecked what little good 
name Betty had manufactured; for in his desire to restrain 
the resident heirs he sent to Providence to look into Betty’s 
past. He even advertised for heirs. And they arose. And 
the odors from the somnolent muck heap became a miasm of 
scandal. 

It was then that George Washington Bowen cast aside his 
policy of silence and came forward at the age of seventy- 
nine to confess, or to boast, that he was, as the testimony 
states, “a come-by-chance born in a fancy house.” He was 
told that a law enacted ten years before enabled an illegiti¬ 
mate son to inherit from his mother when there were no 
legitimate children, and he sued Nelson Chase for the estate. 

He summoned to his aid a cloud of toothless witnesses 
ranging from seventy-nine to eighty-nine years of age. To 
these was added Mary Marilla Steven, who came all the 
way from Grand Rapids, Michigan, to testify; and who man¬ 
aged to renew the suspicion that when the wounded Stephen 
Jumel was left in Betty’s care she let him bleed to death. 
Other witnesses emphasized their belief that Mary Bownes 
was really the daughter of Betty and Stephen Jumel. But 
she was dead and George Washington Bowen was the only 
living being claiming to have been the issue of her loins. 

On him the brilliant O’Conor centered his fire. In one of 
his briefs he wrote: 

There seems to be a distinct tendency in human nature, not 
sufficiently noticed hitherto, inclining poor people to believe 
themselves the inheritors of great estates—a belief which 
thrives, not upon evidence, but upon the want of it. A statement 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


349 

of the different stocks upon which Madame Jumel was grafted 
would be amusing. One only, at the most, could be true; but 
all were supported by an equal weight of evidence. If there be 
any virtue in the solemn statements of deceased grandmothers, 
many of these claims could not be resisted. One element of 
weakness was common to all of them—they were for sale; and, 
as the market was glutted, most of them were suffered to perish 
for want of a purchaser. Syndicates were, however, made up 
for several, always, of course, including one or more lawyers, 
and, as soon as the will was set aside, heirs of law appeared 
in great force. Ip dealing with these attacks it may easily be 
imagined that neither the complainants nor the courts have been 
left without occupation. . . . 

The present claimant possesses an advantage which avoids the 
rock upon which others split. He starts with the assertion that 
he is films nullius in the law, accepts Madame Jumel’s true 
pedigree, and claims that he is the fruit of her body. If it be 
difficult, as it must be, for a bastard of eighty-five to furnish 
direct proof from whose womb he proceeded, it is equally diffi¬ 
cult to meet any proof which may be brought, imputing him to 
one woman, by direct evidence that he was born of another. 
It was with conscious and just triumph that this claimant’s coun¬ 
sel exclaimed to the jury on the trial of the ejectment, “If he is 
not the son of Madame Jumel, whose son is he?” 

The lawyers for Bowen did not spare Betty in youth or 
age. They brought forward all the sordid ugliness of Phebe 
Kelley’s life, and Betty’s. They claimed that George Wash¬ 
ington Bowen was “somebody’s son—somebody’s illegitimate 
son—born—not rained down from Arcturus. No other 
mother was named or hinted at or thought of than this Betsy 
Bowen, otherwise Madame Jumel. As an old gentleman in 
Providence once said to me, ‘Why, he is just as well known 
as Betsy Bowen’s bastard as the town pump on Congress 
Common.’ ” 

The opponents of George Washington Bowen accused him 
of perjury, conspiracy, defamation. When he was asked if 
he were illegitimate, he answered, dismally: 

“Why, you must make that out as you have a mind. If I 
had no father or mother, I don’t want any slur put upon me, 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


350 

It is something I couldn’t help. There may be a good many 
others in the same condition, if you go into the pedigree.” 

Aged witnesses brought Betty back to life again, drifting 
as a little beauty through the vile life of old Providence and 
climbing over the pale of decency in New York. It was 
thus that the truth was fetched up from oblivion in the stam¬ 
mering of irascible old witnesses seeing their youth more 
clearly than the years between. 

Ancient Daniel Hull, whom the lawyers badgered till he 
fainted, insisted that he remembered Betty as a little girl 
pleading for cookies: “I used to carry the gals cookies. 
They used to run out to the chaise. They used to have 
chaises in them days.” He remembered Betty growing up 
into “a tall slim woman and very pretty” and “flirting around 
there to a great rate—and everybody taking notice of it. I 
guess she was one of those loose characters.” 

Then the boys began to laugh about her because she grew 
so large. “The talk was, she was like to have a baby by a 
rich man there in Providence. In old times boys always 
laughed at those things. I can remember her looks just as 
well now. Thinking it over it all comes to me.” 

Then one day he saw her, sitting up in bed, and “she 
called me and she says to me, ‘Do you want to see my nice 
fat baby?’ She gave me some coppers and wanted me to 
buy candy with them. I saw her carrying the baby around 
in her arms after she got well, and I used to see her having 
it nursing out of a bottle. It was a curious kind of 
a shaped thing in them days. I guess she didn’t give no milk, 
or something.” 

Under the incessant nagging of counsel, he broke out in 
protests. “I belonged to the Saratoga privateer. I have been 
a warrior in my day. There was Stanton Furber and me, 
and Bill Field we used to be playmates together. They are all 
dead but me. I am one of the old Captain Isaac Hull’s folks. 
I am a true old ’76 Whig. It hurts me to talk. I am all 
worried out. . . . That’s a plaguey foolish question to ask a 
man. You needn’t think you can frighten me because you 
come from New York.” 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


35i 

He saw Betty aboard the packet with Lavinia Ballou and 
a girl named Teal, but no baby. He saw her when she came 
back with the body of a seaman named Carpenter, “captain of 
an Indiaman out of New York.” 

He saw her again when she came back to Providence as 
the rich wife of the Frenchman and the boys hooted her 
away. There was no question that Madame Jumel was the 
Betty Bowen who was the mother of George Washington 
Bowen. 

An old sailor was called to the stand and remembered 
vividly the vision Betty made when she was living in Mr. 
Jumel’s house in Whitehall Street. He saw her the day she 
owned her first carriage, and he remembered that and the 
black horses. He recalled her clearly as “a very pretty 
woman indeed; stout, full-chested; a fine-looking woman. 
She generally used to dress and sit at the window in the 
morning—exhibiting herself—generally in a white muslin 
dress—oh, very well dressed.” 

The old valet, Henry Nodine, now seventy-six years old, 
was dragged out to testify, protesting that he wouldn’t have 
been there if he “hadn’t been catched unawares.” He tried 
to tell of the great quarrel between Betty and Jumel when 
Jumel learned of the boy Betty had had. 

They called others, a coachman, a cook, all testifying to 
things that have complicated the life story of Betty and 
ruined the structure she reared. 

The upshot of the case was that a jury decided against 
George Washington Bowen; decided that he was not the son 
of Eliza B. Jumel; thus throwing doubt upon the “facts” 
that contradicted the legends, so that no one can say just 
what is fiction and what is history. 

George Washington Bowen appealed the case, of course, 
and waited thirteen years for the final decree of the highest 
court; and it was adverse. Still he went on claiming that he 
was Betty’s son until his death at the age of ninety. 

Then a cousin of his took up the fight and eventually, in 
1903, sold his claim to another suitor. 

In the meanwhile, in 1887, the house was sold for a hun- 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


352 

dred thousand dollars, with ground extending to the city 
waterpipe which had come down from Croton long since. 
Later a part of the estate was sold for the same price to 
General Earle and he sold it to the city of New York for 
two hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars. The Daugh¬ 
ters of the American Revolution took possession of it and 
gradually began its restoration as Washington’s Head¬ 
quarters. 

And now it stands in serene and demure beauty, a glorious, 
inglorious enigma, a house whose walls reek with dignity and 
infamy, with war and romance, tragedy and woeful realism. 
The city which had been so far away has climbed the hill 
and swarmed about the old house like a sea, and swept on 
past in an unending tidal wave swiftly slow. 

Tourists and sightseers in coveys visit the house, but not as 
“Washington’s Headquarters/’ It is always, must always be, 
the Jumel Mansion. 

For the warm-hearted, hot-tempered, dance-mad Wash¬ 
ington has been doomed to be a frozen allegory of majesty 
in the national gallery of his country. But Betty Jumel 
lives as one of the picturesque sinners, cherished like Rahab, 
the harlot, the nearest her nation has come to furnishing a 
Maintenon or a Du Barry to the dull envy of the respectables. 

It is enough for the historian to say, Thus such a one did 
at such a time in such a way. But the moralist looks for a 
lesson, a reward for virtue or a revenge upon vice. 

The historian has done his duty when he has discovered 
and honestly spread out the chronicle. Let the moralist pick 
and choose for himself and draw what comfort or warning 
best suits his creed. 

Betty’s son, George Washington Bowen, if he were her 
son, pleaded: 

“It was something I couldn’t help.” 

Who, indeed, can help anything—or anybody? Could not 
Betty have handed the same plea up from her grave when 
her very soul was brought to trial ?— 

“It was something I couldn’t help!” 

She was goaded through the world by a legitimate, a 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


353 

commendable longing for beauty, glory, and wealth. Her 
methods were ignoble, her sins many perhaps. Was she 
punished for them? 

Did she in the end fare better or worse than the kindly, 
industrious, generous, honorable Jumel, whom she bled to 
death financially if not actually ? 

Left alone in the cold mansion, he sighed that she had 
cheated him out of his possessions; yet, since they would go 
at last to his beloved adopted child, Mary Bownes, he said 
he was satisfied. But Mary Bownes did not live to inherit 
them, and her children were disinherited by the law! 

Betty seems to have tried everything in life except self- 
sacrifice, and to have experienced everything but true love. 

She seems never to have found happiness or contentment. 
But how many do? 

She never gained her one ambition—recognition. Yet 
who gains his ambition? 

She died in slovenly insanity. Yet her insanity was gorge¬ 
ous with imagined triumphs. And she who as a little girl 
ran screaming from a hovel torn down by a mob in Provi¬ 
dence, ended her days in a most beautiful mansion on a high 
hill overlooking the greatest city of her continent. 

The old Roman poet, Martial, devoted three of his price¬ 
less epigrams to little bits of life preserved, from death by 
being caught in flowing resin that hardened into transparent 
amber. 

In one he speaks of an ant overtaken by a drop of gum; 
it was “contemptible in life, but its death made it precious 
(vita contempt a manente, funeribus facta est nunc pretiosa 
suis ). 

In another drop a bee hides and glows (et laiet et lucet) 
“as if locked in its own nectar; a worthy reward for its toils, 
a death it might well have wished to die. ,, 

In the third long jewel is a viper, surprised and fettered 
by the clinging dew and “sealed in a nobler tomb than you 
yourself, Cleopatra could boast.” 

Betty Jumel had something of the ant, something of the 
bee, something of the viper. The slow and stealthy drip of 


THE GOLDEN LADDER 


354 

gossip followed her, enveloped her, became tradition, and 
now holds her fast forever, deathlessly enambered. 

She who might have gone down into the oblivion that 
buries innumerable other women of her time, the good wives 
and mothers with the wantons and the evil ones—she has 
written her name indelibly on the beadroll of the American 
immortals. She has become a part of her people’s legend. 


THE END 



Harder Fiction 


INNER DARKNESS By Ethelda Daggett Hesser 

Simple, ruthless, even tragic, this striking story of men and 
women whose lives are deep-rooted in the black soil of the 
Middle West has much the flavor of Hardy’s dramas of rural 
England. “It is a rare pleasure to welcome a newcomer among 
American novelists of such unmistakable dramatic power, ca¬ 
pacity of understanding and narrative skill as the hitherto un¬ 
known authoress of this story. She brings a distinctly new note 
to our current fiction.”— New York Herald. 

WAGES By Mary Lanier Magruder 

Vivid romance and yet a stark reality of passion are merged in 
this tale of the Kentucky lowlands. It is a story of a man and 
a woman, utterly different from each other and with different 
ideas of life and marriage, yet strangely brought together to 
work out their destiny. It is a tale of the unfolding, through a 
conflict of dark human emotions, and against the power of fate, 
of a great and generous nature under the influence of love. 

THE ABLE McLAUGHLINS By Margaret Wilson 

The Harper Prize Novel. 

An extraordinary combination of best-seller, prize-winner, and 
first novel that no reader of our native fiction should miss. “In 
this story of a group of Scotch pioneers in Iowa, Miss Wilson, 
like Willa Cather, like Herbert Quick and like Joseph Herges- 
heimer in some of his best stories, has recognized the great 
human drama in our own historic past, and has tilled the soil,— 
to her own great profit and to the advantage of our American 
letters.”— Harry Hansen in the Chicago Daily News. 

LUMMOX By Fannie Hurst 

The famous novel whose central character has already taken 
her place among the universally known and permanent figures 
of American literature. “Out of every sentence in Miss Hurst’s 
tremendous volume comes the lummox. I know Bertha. She 
lives. It is a book crowded with drama. It is a book by a woman 
of wisdom and comprehension—yes, of genius. It places Miss 
Hurst with one stride in the ranks of our foremost novelists.”— 
Charles Hanson Towne in the International Book Review. 

HARPER & BROTHERS 
T 87 





Harper Fiction 


BUNK By W. E. Woodward 

“A novel whose publication is an event in American satire. 
One can fancy Laurence Sterne and Mark Twain, somewhere in 
the beyond, putting their heads together over a copy of ‘Bunk’ 
and rejoicing at the appearance on earth of a new humorist 
capable of dealing intelligently with a very large subject.”— 
L. H. Robbins in the New York Times. 

“A unique, rollicking, immensely entertaining novel. A book 
that is absolutely ‘different,’ written with a gusto and an irre¬ 
pressible spirit of fun that is communicated to the reader. A 
brilliant achievement .”—Chicago Daily News. 

THE HAPPY ISLES By Basil King 

The story of the son of a wealthy family, kidnapped in baby¬ 
hood and forced to struggle upwards by himself in extraordinary 
surroundings of crime and poverty, but also, strangely, of love. 
“A book packed solidly with enjoyable reading, and with realism 
neither sordid nor sex-cursed, but dusted over with romance. 
Some very fine and even delicately beautiful thoughts have been 
given expression in a novel of engrossing interest .”—Philadelphia 
North American. 

THE GOLDEN COCOON By Ruth Cross 

A new personality, rememberable and charming, is brought to 
life in this first novel. It is the story of Molly, oldest of the 
brood of the “shiftless Shannons,” quick-tempered, imaginative, 
intensely individual, and of her adventures in life and love. 
Against a richly colored background of New York and the far 
South is told a tale of deep emotional experience and of gay 
courage which is as imaginative and beautiful as it is dramatic. 

MOLESKIN JOE By Patrick MacGill 

A thrilling story of the strange adventures and love of a young 
workman in an isolated construction camp, by an author whose 
tales, written out of his own long experience among the toilers 
of the world, have gained for him an international reputation. 
“It is a good story, it is written with skill, it pictures its scenes 
and people vividly, it captures and holds the reader’s interest. 
He plunges the reader at once into the full current of interest, 
and he keeps it going, full and strong, until the end.”— New 
York Times. 

HARPER & BROTHERS 

T88 




































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